3 ms·

what if the executive had been pick-pocketed

• shadowgovt 5y ago
  EDIT: I had mis-remembered this part of the story. ;) What was stored in the executive's brain was the combination to a second floor safe in another datacenter that held one of the two necessary activation cards. Whether they were able to pass it to the datacenter over a secure / semi-secure line or flew back to hand-deliver the combination I do not remember. If you mean "Would the pick-pocket have access to valuable Google data," I think the answer is "No, they still don't have the key in the safe on the other continent." If you mean "Would the pick-pocket have created a critical outage at Google that would have required intense amounts of labor to recover from," I don't know because I don't know how many layers of redundancy their recovery protocols had for that outage. It's possible Google came within a hair's breadth of "Thaw out the password database from offline storage, rebuild what can be rebuilt by hand, and inform a smaller subset of the company that some passwords are now just gone and they'll have to recover on their own" territory.