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As the effect of yesterday's AWS event demonstrates, the major Amazon, Microsoft, and Google data centers are surely top tier targets in every adversary's war p

As the effect of yesterday's AWS event demonstrates, the major Amazon, Microsoft, and Google data centers are surely top tier targets in every adversary's war plans. The decentralized internet is less of a reality today than it was years ago.

diggan 1y ago
Don't we have more internet submarine cables and less single points of failure in our internet infrastructure today than years ago? If so, shouldn't that make it easier to route around failures? The web though I agree isn't very decentralized.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Maybe yes in that regard. But in the past, most organizations ran their own mail and web servers. Software supporting the business ran on-prem. Now they use Google or Azure or AWS. So business and civilian usage, at least, seem more vulnerable now.
  - HippyTed 1y ago
    We sacrificed resillience for effeciency. Now things are much more fragile and liable to exploitation.
- Root_Denied 1y ago
  Considering that the AWS outage took out a lot of lines of communication (email, video, chat systems) for both commercial and government entities, I'd say that US-East-1 is a pretty big single point of failure. Even if it didn't result in infrastructure impact directly, if there was some kind of infrastructure issue and you had delayed or unavailable communications, how would you know? How quickly could a response be mounted? There's some parts of the infrastructure that could damage themselves irreparably in the time it would take to to fix the outage or get comms routed through a backup channel - like parts of the electrical grid or water treatment plants. An attacker (read: nation-state actor) wouldn't even need to take down US-East-1, it could just take advantage of the outage. I assume (hope?) there's some kind of backup comms plan or infra in place for critical events, but I don't actually know.

diggan 1y ago

Don't we have more internet submarine cables and less single points of failure in our internet infrastructure today than years ago? If so, shouldn't that make it easier to route around failures? The web though I agree isn't very decentralized.

SoftTalker 1y ago
Maybe yes in that regard. But in the past, most organizations ran their own mail and web servers. Software supporting the business ran on-prem. Now they use Google or Azure or AWS. So business and civilian usage, at least, seem more vulnerable now.
- HippyTed 1y ago
  We sacrificed resillience for effeciency. Now things are much more fragile and liable to exploitation.
Root_Denied 1y ago
Considering that the AWS outage took out a lot of lines of communication (email, video, chat systems) for both commercial and government entities, I'd say that US-East-1 is a pretty big single point of failure. Even if it didn't result in infrastructure impact directly, if there was some kind of infrastructure issue and you had delayed or unavailable communications, how would you know? How quickly could a response be mounted? There's some parts of the infrastructure that could damage themselves irreparably in the time it would take to to fix the outage or get comms routed through a backup channel - like parts of the electrical grid or water treatment plants. An attacker (read: nation-state actor) wouldn't even need to take down US-East-1, it could just take advantage of the outage. I assume (hope?) there's some kind of backup comms plan or infra in place for critical events, but I don't actually know.