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A consultant who works with NASA once told me that there was an incident where they had exposed several petabytes of data to the public Internet. Because no one
by yellow_lead 5y ago
A consultant who works with NASA once told me that there was an incident where they had exposed several petabytes of data to the public Internet. Because no one had the storage capability for the data though, they wrote off the security incident completely.
- silicon2401 5y agoThat's pretty hilarious. Reminds me of construction equipment. At some point on some highway, I realized construction machines, materials, and so on are probably pretty expensive, yet they're just left out there without even a tarp to hide them. I guess they're so difficult to move it wouldn't be worth even trying to steal them.
- cameronh90 5y agoMaybe theft is proportional to value density?
- milesvp 5y agoTheft is often a crime of convenience. It’s counterintuitive, but thefts actually tend to go down during recessions. People just don’t leave the house as much, so they don’t have as many opportunities to steal. Source: good friend was a public defender
- pope_meat 5y agoThey're all tagged with GPS trackers these days. The rare case of heavy equipment like that being stolen almost always results in recovery because of that. I would recommend just trying to steal some parts of the machine, rather than the whole thing. If you do enough research and presell the parts before taking them you would probably get away with it for a while. Thought exercise only, I ain't cut out for the life of crime.
- Arrath 5y agoHydraulic cylinders would probably be a good place to start, just based on anecdata from seeing equipment down for long, expensive periods of time as cylinders go off for rebuild/reseal/resleeving.
- cotillion 5y agoWhat thieves seem to go for nowdays is the d-gps hardware installed in graders / excavators used in large projects. Very expensive stuff which is easy to hide. A Leica 3d kit is something like $40k...
- Arrath 5y agoI've heard the same[1], but that kind of thing seems trivially easy to track down, no? [1]In fact I was involved on a project where some thieves took a sawzall to the equipment storage conex over the weekend and stole every bit of GPS equipment they could get their hands on. They were pretty quickly tracked down when they tried to offload it though.
- R0b0t1 5y agoCould sell it outside of the country? It does make me wonder.
- wearywanderer 5y agoLojack has often been installed on construction equipment since the 80s or 90s.
- Arrath 5y agoThey even often all share the same ignition key.
- mikestew 5y agoAre you confident that is the case today? I know it used to be the case like 30 years ago, but I thought that was fixed since. Or did the advent of GPS trackers allow them to go back to The One Key? :-)
- Arrath 5y agoOh 50/50. I know for a fact that the fleet of haul trucks on my current project all share the same key, and the bulldozers and excavators from the same manufacturer do as well. I expect that equipment in rental fleets are keyed differently, though.
- mikestew 5y agoInteresting, thanks. I've long since become a software dev with tender, callous-free hands so I have no idea what the current state is.
- dghlsakjg 5y agoFor a lot of cat equipment this is true. Go to a caterpillar dealer, and you can ask for a new key by model number. They don't need serial numbers.
- sneak 5y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Construction-Equipment-Master-Set-Ignition-Machines/dp/B009XYK8P6/ https://www.amazon.com/Construction-Equipment-Master-Set-Ign...
- temp8964 5y agoHow many people have the bandwidth to download it?
- klhutchins 5y agoI wonder if a partial download would be of value?
- vladTheInhaler 5y agoYeah, not surprising at all. When I interned there, there was a whole onboarding segment about network security that constantly made reference to a huge hack that had apparently happened and IIRC slowed their internal email system to a crawl with the sheer volume of phishing emails flying around. Everyone knew about it and was very embarrassed. And yet they would let us take our personal laptops in and out and connect to the network with no real oversight, because they didn't have the funds to give everyone their own machine.
- yellow_lead 5y agoThats really sad to hear. I used to think NASA would be some pinnacle of security but it is government I suppose.