I'd be tempted to torch the place for the insurance money and move.
Which would play right into the NSA's hands, as you move on from your torched building, and agents quietly recover some fireproof surveillance blackbox units which had been dropped down various walls, that your torching made retrieval a simple task.
If you do a wipe and restore of the OS from backup, from a date you can verifiably show was before the compromise; AND repair the security holes and vulnerabilities, and make sure to change all security credentials -- passwords, etc, , before reconnecting to the internet.
Then after so restoring... the biggest things you actually should worry about are.... (1) Something else on your network may likewise be compromised, such as other servers or networking infrastructure - especially anything Telnet is used to manage, anything managed from the server or having shared credentials, OR whose credentials were used on or through the server --- during the compromise, the hacker may have sniffed credentials, logged keystrokes entered by admins via RDP or SSH, or the hacker may have covertly pivoted through the broken system to quietly compromise or place undetectable covert backdoors in other systems; (3) You didn't actually close the bug used to compromise, due to complete info, OR (4) There is yet another similar bug, that the persistent attacker, or another attacker will find..... and undo all that repair work seconds after the system is back up.
Those were the good ol' days. These days everybody knows there are half a dozen backdoors in the various firmwares that even an OS wipe won't get. (disk, network, bios, etc)
Hogwash. While it is true that such backdoors can created, and nation-states may have had backdoor tampering installed in the server, first -- it is not shown to be used, and firmware based attacks are also hard because they are hardware-specific, AND computer hardware varies widely. FOR NOW, you still do not need to worry about system firmwares. There are scant if any significant cases, where firmware backdoors have been leveraged by hackers.
I see post-compromise firmware backdoors firmly on my security radar, but it's not really a major threat or risk yet.
It's kind of like talking about ARP-injection based sniffing malware. It's certainly possible, but the bad guys have not reached that level of tooling or technological enablement just yet.
When your server gets rooted by a hacker, every security professional worth his money will tell you to wipe it and do a complete reinstall.
And then get countermanded/overridden by the server or workstation technician or management, because wiping and reinstalling is too time consuming and/or expensive. Just get some antivirus and security scanners software setup, clean out all the malware, and resecure it, so the system works again.
"We won't tolerate laziness from you security folks. You have to do your job and make sure the system is clean in a timely way. No you cannot make the user reinstall their Windows 7. No to revoking admin rights... all our employees have to have admin rights to their workstations, so they can install software, as the need arises..."
The drive may remap some sectors because they are failing, it may be very difficult to ensure that all the physical sectors are overwritten and not just all the logical sectors.
This is where the SECURE ERAS EUNIT ATA command comes in.
There are only a small number of such replacement 512 byte sectors available.
Most drives have not done remapping a significant number of sectors.
The probability that critically sensitive data just so happens to reside in a remapped sector, is scant at best.
That makes sense for the hard drives, SSDs, and other magnetic storage medium.
Can you explain the rationale behind physical destruction of the CPU itself, motherboard, and other expensive electronics that cannot actually store any user data?
Ignoring the fact that copies exist (and everyone involved knew that), physical destruction is in fact the recommended way to destroy the data on a hard drive, SSD drive, flash memory, etc. etc.
Grinding the motherboard and CPU, are not ways of destroying data.
They're ways of causing a loss of capital, in terms of dollars used to purchase the equipment.
I don't think the authorities' aim so much is to destroy the data, BUT to try to create a financial loss for Snowden and whoever's helping him, in terms of capital dollars spent to purchase those computers and media.
If they publish more and upset the GCHQ again; the Guardian may be forced to destroy other agency assets.
This may be a warning shot: "Don't screw with us, or we will come in with a demolition crew and a warrant to seize and demolish all electronics...."
Otherwise, they would kind of care that the news reporting agency has plenty of other copies, and other people have plenty of copies.
So this is a message, the presence of cameras confirms it.
This is a firm message that says: "Stop publishing."
"Another word about Snowden, AND the next supervised immediate destruction order will target all your reporters' computers, All your backoffice servers, All the servers in your web farm, and all your company's backup disks."
Free Super Saver Shipping is a minimum of $35 now, and usually takes 3-5 days to even ship out from Amazon,
Interesting... I suppose it depends on item. Some items have significant shipping, but are prime eligible. A few items are ineligible for super saver shipping; for some items there is a "Subscribe and Save" option that includes free shipping and a discount --- for automatic reordering of the item on a continual X week basis.
Some big ticket items include automatic free shipping, even without prime.
Some 3rd party sellers have items where shipping is free with or without prime.
Other 3rd party sellers have charges for basic shipping that apply to prime users --- when
the seller's not a "fulfilled by Amazon" seller.
Personally I love prime, but at $129 I would actually count my purchases
Prime makes financial sense if you make on average more than 2 orders a month items that would be covered by prime that would not be eligible for free shipping, at $5 shipping.
The streaming videos and free upgrade to 2 day shipping on prime eligible items: add additional value.
I suppose what would be interesting is if they started offering a "Prime Lite" for $60 a year ---
with no streaming videos, no 2 day shipping, but free standard shipping on all normally prime-eligible items fulfilled by Amazon.
After 3-4 years of this, hasn't there been a precedent or something or higher level court getting involved so that all these judges don't have to reconsider the same argument over and over again?
No... and there won't be a precedent, until the RIAA finds a judge willing to solidify the precedent that is favorable to them.
When driverless cars are commonplace, a GPS outage will leave millions of drivers stranded away from home because they will no longer know how to get home on their own
Wait.... GPS outage? If humans can find their way around without GPS; I see no reason a driverless car shouldn't be able to.
Hell... they can have a huge map database in the car.
All the car needs to do is use its last known position plus data from sensors and dead-reckoning based navigation to identify its current position.
Certainly, the driverless car would be unsafe, if it relied on continuous perfect GPS reception to work.
There are many places --- such as inside parking garages, or on roads in deep forested areas: where a usable GPS signal cannot be received. Plenty of times in urban areas; it's ordinary for GPS signals to be interfered with so much so that GPS devices give up and say satellite connection lost.
Ok, let's assume in this wondrous future, you are being driven (can't exactly call it driving if you're not in control) on some country roads and you encounter a very large bull standing in the middle of the road.
This is why you should always, always bring firearms, flares, and some device to scare away bulls with you, when driving on country roads: especially in driverless cars --- never be without them.
When you encounter the bull, you load your gun with a blank.... fire off the warning.
This will surely draw the attention of the bull, better than a horn blow.
If no response; grab a pellet/BB gun or other firearm -- after a few hits, the bull is sure to leave.
Sure there is... how else would you propose we signal, when the car just in front of us is driving at 10 miles per hour on a 30 mph road, when a pedestrian is taking too long to finish their crossing, a car in front of us is slowing down or taking too long to complete their right turn, or the car in front of us is stopped and signalling left in the middle of the road, spending forever at the stop sign, failing to take a right turn on red, stopping at a yellow light, failing to accelerate immediately after the light turned green, etc, etc.
This is in California, where a latte goes for about $100, and a month's rent for a family of four
probably exceeds $15K.
If you're charging someone $15000 for a 10 week course,
This is about par for the course for professional training. A 1 week Microsoft Exchange or VMware certification bootcamp
goes for about $3500, then a few hundred bucks to take the exam.
Coder training in 10 weeks would have to be even more intense, to be effective....
I see. So, arguably the biggest sporting event of the year that generates billions of dollars in merchandising for US resellers, should somehow NOT be a focus of attention in the month of January?
I am saying that the IPR enforcement should be restricted to goods that actually harm consumers and contain a meaningful misrepresentation about what the product is. For example: items that have substantial value per unit, such as fake Rolex. Or electronics phony branding.
A "fake" T-shirt with a team logo actually directly benefits the people.
The government is hurting people and adding more fuel to this "product with sports logos" racket, by giving welfare to these companies, at the expense of higher product prices for the American people.
Out of the four harddrive failures I have had in the last ten years (I often replace smaller drives with bigger ones before they fail), 3 of them were Seagate drives and one was a hitachi.
What was the fraction of drives in your environment at the time that were Seagate......... and were most of the Seagates the same age as the other brand drives in the environment, or brand new, or older on average?
Obviously if there are 3 times as many Seagates in the environment, or the Seagates have twice the I/O load, then many more Seagate failures would be expected
The benefit of Backblaze's numbers, is.... we pretty much know the workload and operating conditions were basically identical across the board, for disk drives in their pods, and Backblaze had very large numbers of all various vendors' disk drives; without biases such as "Most of the Seagates were brand new", etc.
Perhaps this is how you accomadate Seagate.... "We throw all our hard drives out after 5 years" so Seagate's drives seem pretty much the same to us..... (we don't bother checking which vendors' drives have greater longevity, because it's against the industry talking points --- even if those industry talking points about hard drive longevity are not backed by any rigorous statistical study, or even informal statistical analysis based on historic real-world data about hard drive longevity)
(Thank FSM Maxtor went away: they were the WORST).
They didn't go away. Seagate bought them and embedded them into their own business.
Keep that in mind --- just because a HDD has a certain manufacturer, doesn't necessarily mean the HDD is equal to other hard drives made by that manufacturer (even of the same model number); reliability varies with manufacturer standards over time, and it may depend on exactly which of the manufacturer's factories produced such and such unit.
There used to be a great many more vendors, many whose products were not as reliable as the top HDD vendors.
Seagate was generally a respectable alternative to Western Digital or Hitachi.
However, based on Backblaze's experience with a very large number of disks: it would appear rather strongly that as a whole the Seagate drives are not the most trouble free lately.
the known problem with this series "does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive".
Of course not.... the bug just results in the controller becoming permanently busy, and if your drive is still under warranty, and you work with support, you can probably get the drive unbricked and updated.
No data loss is caused by the drive -- any loss caused by your RAID array deciding multiple drives have "failed", or by your operating system.... it's all your RAID or OS vendor's fault, not Seagate-caused data loss.
Magic has a carbon footprint. Why do you think Gandalf, Bilbo, Frodo, and later Sam had to leave on the elven ships bound for the undying lands?
If not for Magic's carbon footprint, the eruption of the Supervolcano at mount doom, should have brought nuclear winter upon the shire and all of middle earth, for sure.
We need someone new to step up and challenge the DoC export restrictions on published website content
as unconstitutional interference with free speech,
like we had with DJ Bernstein challenging cryptography export restrictions.
What is Oracle doing wrong here? From what I can tell by reading the article this firm distributed Oracle's binary updates, which Oracle charge a lot of money for.
The problem is it represents a departure from what Sun was doing.
Enterprises already paid a lot of money for the Sun hardware, so they could get Solaris included with it.
Solaris was never free for production use.
If you want Solaris for production, you always had to either pay a large fee for each copy,
or buy the Sun hardware which came at a huge premium, but included Solaris.....
much like Apple includes MacOS with their hardware.
Acquiring a vendor, AND locking down all the patch download websites for server firmware updates and OS updates, while requiring customers start paying extortionate rates to even continue basic software update service ------ is not the path to becoming a well-liked company.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be tempted to torch the place for the insurance money and move.
Which would play right into the NSA's hands, as you move on from your torched building, and agents quietly recover some fireproof surveillance blackbox units which had been dropped down various walls, that your torching made retrieval a simple task.
If you do a wipe and restore of the OS from backup, from a date you can verifiably show was before the compromise; AND repair the security holes and vulnerabilities, and make sure to change all security credentials -- passwords, etc, , before reconnecting to the internet.
Then after so restoring... the biggest things you actually should worry about are.... (1) Something else on your network may likewise be compromised, such as other servers or networking infrastructure - especially anything Telnet is used to manage, anything managed from the server or having shared credentials, OR whose credentials were used on or through the server --- during the compromise, the hacker may have sniffed credentials, logged keystrokes entered by admins via RDP or SSH, or the hacker may have covertly pivoted through the broken system to quietly compromise or place undetectable covert backdoors in other systems; (3) You didn't actually close the bug used to compromise, due to complete info, OR (4) There is yet another similar bug, that the persistent attacker, or another attacker will find..... and undo all that repair work seconds after the system is back up.
Those were the good ol' days. These days everybody knows there are half a dozen backdoors in the various firmwares that even an OS wipe won't get. (disk, network, bios, etc)
Hogwash. While it is true that such backdoors can created, and nation-states may have had backdoor tampering installed in the server, first -- it is not shown to be used, and firmware based attacks are also hard because they are hardware-specific, AND computer hardware varies widely. FOR NOW, you still do not need to worry about system firmwares. There are scant if any significant cases, where firmware backdoors have been leveraged by hackers.
I see post-compromise firmware backdoors firmly on my security radar, but it's not really a major threat or risk yet.
It's kind of like talking about ARP-injection based sniffing malware. It's certainly possible, but the bad guys have not reached that level of tooling or technological enablement just yet.
When your server gets rooted by a hacker, every security professional worth his money will tell you to wipe it and do a complete reinstall.
And then get countermanded/overridden by the server or workstation technician or management, because wiping and reinstalling is too time consuming and/or expensive. Just get some antivirus and security scanners software setup, clean out all the malware, and resecure it, so the system works again.
"We won't tolerate laziness from you security folks. You have to do your job and make sure the system is clean in a timely way. No you cannot make the user reinstall their Windows 7. No to revoking admin rights... all our employees have to have admin rights to their workstations, so they can install software, as the need arises..."
The drive may remap some sectors because they are failing, it may be very difficult to ensure that all the physical sectors are overwritten and not just all the logical sectors.
This is where the SECURE ERAS EUNIT ATA command comes in.
There are only a small number of such replacement 512 byte sectors available. Most drives have not done remapping a significant number of sectors.
The probability that critically sensitive data just so happens to reside in a remapped sector, is scant at best.
If you look at small shards of what's left of a drive then there's no doubt.
Unless the data's never been overwritten, and then someone pieces a few of those shards back together, for inspection under an electron microscope.
then physical destruction is the way to go.
That makes sense for the hard drives, SSDs, and other magnetic storage medium.
Can you explain the rationale behind physical destruction of the CPU itself, motherboard, and other expensive electronics that cannot actually store any user data?
Ignoring the fact that copies exist (and everyone involved knew that), physical destruction is in fact the recommended way to destroy the data on a hard drive, SSD drive, flash memory, etc. etc.
Grinding the motherboard and CPU, are not ways of destroying data. They're ways of causing a loss of capital, in terms of dollars used to purchase the equipment.
I don't think the authorities' aim so much is to destroy the data, BUT to try to create a financial loss for Snowden and whoever's helping him, in terms of capital dollars spent to purchase those computers and media.
If they publish more and upset the GCHQ again; the Guardian may be forced to destroy other agency assets. This may be a warning shot: "Don't screw with us, or we will come in with a demolition crew and a warrant to seize and demolish all electronics...."
Otherwise, they would kind of care that the news reporting agency has plenty of other copies, and other people have plenty of copies.
So this is a message, the presence of cameras confirms it.
This is a firm message that says: "Stop publishing."
"Another word about Snowden, AND the next supervised immediate destruction order will target all your reporters' computers, All your backoffice servers, All the servers in your web farm, and all your company's backup disks."
Free Super Saver Shipping is a minimum of $35 now, and usually takes 3-5 days to even ship out from Amazon,
Interesting... I suppose it depends on item. Some items have significant shipping, but are prime eligible. A few items are ineligible for super saver shipping; for some items there is a "Subscribe and Save" option that includes free shipping and a discount --- for automatic reordering of the item on a continual X week basis.
Some big ticket items include automatic free shipping, even without prime.
Some 3rd party sellers have items where shipping is free with or without prime.
Other 3rd party sellers have charges for basic shipping that apply to prime users --- when the seller's not a "fulfilled by Amazon" seller.
Personally I love prime, but at $129 I would actually count my purchases
Prime makes financial sense if you make on average more than 2 orders a month items that would be covered by prime that would not be eligible for free shipping, at $5 shipping.
The streaming videos and free upgrade to 2 day shipping on prime eligible items: add additional value.
I suppose what would be interesting is if they started offering a "Prime Lite" for $60 a year --- with no streaming videos, no 2 day shipping, but free standard shipping on all normally prime-eligible items fulfilled by Amazon.
After 3-4 years of this, hasn't there been a precedent or something or higher level court getting involved so that all these judges don't have to reconsider the same argument over and over again?
No... and there won't be a precedent, until the RIAA finds a judge willing to solidify the precedent that is favorable to them.
When driverless cars are commonplace, a GPS outage will leave millions of drivers stranded away from home because they will no longer know how to get home on their own
Wait.... GPS outage? If humans can find their way around without GPS; I see no reason a driverless car shouldn't be able to.
Hell... they can have a huge map database in the car.
All the car needs to do is use its last known position plus data from sensors and dead-reckoning based navigation to identify its current position.
Certainly, the driverless car would be unsafe, if it relied on continuous perfect GPS reception to work.
There are many places --- such as inside parking garages, or on roads in deep forested areas: where a usable GPS signal cannot be received. Plenty of times in urban areas; it's ordinary for GPS signals to be interfered with so much so that GPS devices give up and say satellite connection lost.
Ok, let's assume in this wondrous future, you are being driven (can't exactly call it driving if you're not in control) on some country roads and you encounter a very large bull standing in the middle of the road.
This is why you should always, always bring firearms, flares, and some device to scare away bulls with you, when driving on country roads: especially in driverless cars --- never be without them.
When you encounter the bull, you load your gun with a blank.... fire off the warning. This will surely draw the attention of the bull, better than a horn blow.
If no response; grab a pellet/BB gun or other firearm -- after a few hits, the bull is sure to leave.
Sure there is... how else would you propose we signal, when the car just in front of us is driving at 10 miles per hour on a 30 mph road, when a pedestrian is taking too long to finish their crossing, a car in front of us is slowing down or taking too long to complete their right turn, or the car in front of us is stopped and signalling left in the middle of the road, spending forever at the stop sign, failing to take a right turn on red, stopping at a yellow light, failing to accelerate immediately after the light turned green, etc, etc.
This is in California, where a latte goes for about $100, and a month's rent for a family of four probably exceeds $15K.
If you're charging someone $15000 for a 10 week course,
This is about par for the course for professional training. A 1 week Microsoft Exchange or VMware certification bootcamp goes for about $3500, then a few hundred bucks to take the exam.
Coder training in 10 weeks would have to be even more intense, to be effective....
I see. So, arguably the biggest sporting event of the year that generates billions of dollars in merchandising for US resellers, should somehow NOT be a focus of attention in the month of January?
I am saying that the IPR enforcement should be restricted to goods that actually harm consumers and contain a meaningful misrepresentation about what the product is. For example: items that have substantial value per unit, such as fake Rolex. Or electronics phony branding.
A "fake" T-shirt with a team logo actually directly benefits the people. The government is hurting people and adding more fuel to this "product with sports logos" racket, by giving welfare to these companies, at the expense of higher product prices for the American people.
Why are you upset at customs agents doing their jobs?
Because their job is to prevent dangerous contraband from entering the country.
Instead, they are wasting the taxpayers' money doing bidding for private companies -- to attempt to curtail unauthorized sports memorabilia.
2 - Which of the following is not an acceptable target to nuke?
I would check all of them.
Out of the four harddrive failures I have had in the last ten years (I often replace smaller drives with bigger ones before they fail), 3 of them were Seagate drives and one was a hitachi.
What was the fraction of drives in your environment at the time that were Seagate......... and were most of the Seagates the same age as the other brand drives in the environment, or brand new, or older on average?
Obviously if there are 3 times as many Seagates in the environment, or the Seagates have twice the I/O load, then many more Seagate failures would be expected
The benefit of Backblaze's numbers, is.... we pretty much know the workload and operating conditions were basically identical across the board, for disk drives in their pods, and Backblaze had very large numbers of all various vendors' disk drives; without biases such as "Most of the Seagates were brand new", etc.
Perhaps this is how you accomadate Seagate.... "We throw all our hard drives out after 5 years" so Seagate's drives seem pretty much the same to us..... (we don't bother checking which vendors' drives have greater longevity, because it's against the industry talking points --- even if those industry talking points about hard drive longevity are not backed by any rigorous statistical study, or even informal statistical analysis based on historic real-world data about hard drive longevity)
(Thank FSM Maxtor went away: they were the WORST).
They didn't go away. Seagate bought them and embedded them into their own business. Keep that in mind --- just because a HDD has a certain manufacturer, doesn't necessarily mean the HDD is equal to other hard drives made by that manufacturer (even of the same model number); reliability varies with manufacturer standards over time, and it may depend on exactly which of the manufacturer's factories produced such and such unit.
There used to be a great many more vendors, many whose products were not as reliable as the top HDD vendors.
Seagate was generally a respectable alternative to Western Digital or Hitachi.
However, based on Backblaze's experience with a very large number of disks: it would appear rather strongly that as a whole the Seagate drives are not the most trouble free lately.
A few years from now.... who knows.
the known problem with this series "does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive".
Of course not.... the bug just results in the controller becoming permanently busy, and if your drive is still under warranty, and you work with support, you can probably get the drive unbricked and updated.
No data loss is caused by the drive -- any loss caused by your RAID array deciding multiple drives have "failed", or by your operating system.... it's all your RAID or OS vendor's fault, not Seagate-caused data loss.
Middle Earth runs by Magic not science
Magic has a carbon footprint. Why do you think Gandalf, Bilbo, Frodo, and later Sam had to leave on the elven ships bound for the undying lands?
If not for Magic's carbon footprint, the eruption of the Supervolcano at mount doom, should have brought nuclear winter upon the shire and all of middle earth, for sure.
We need someone new to step up and challenge the DoC export restrictions on published website content as unconstitutional interference with free speech, like we had with DJ Bernstein challenging cryptography export restrictions.
What is Oracle doing wrong here? From what I can tell by reading the article this firm distributed Oracle's binary updates, which Oracle charge a lot of money for.
The problem is it represents a departure from what Sun was doing. Enterprises already paid a lot of money for the Sun hardware, so they could get Solaris included with it.
Solaris was never free for production use. If you want Solaris for production, you always had to either pay a large fee for each copy, or buy the Sun hardware which came at a huge premium, but included Solaris..... much like Apple includes MacOS with their hardware.
Acquiring a vendor, AND locking down all the patch download websites for server firmware updates and OS updates, while requiring customers start paying extortionate rates to even continue basic software update service ------ is not the path to becoming a well-liked company.