10 ms·
Data centers are such great targets in modern warfare. A few cheap drones can inflict billions in damage with low direct casualties (if the attacker even cares)
by time0ut 5mo ago
Data centers are such great targets in modern warfare. A few cheap drones can inflict billions in damage with low direct casualties (if the attacker even cares). I have heard AWS in particular is secretive about the exact location of their data centers, but no doubt every major country knows exactly where they are.
- cute_boi 5mo agoI wonder if you can uncover where the data center is just by using ping command.
- fragmede 5mo agoThat's some of how geolocation works. Ping can't go faster than the speed of light, so that gives you a circle for where something is. Ping from enough places and you can get a good enough idea, if you're the Iranian Guard or otherwise.
- sophacles 5mo agoYou can find data centers by looking for hvac units in satellite photos.
- Ekaros 5mo agoProbably also grid connections like size of transformers and if there is prominent number of trucks going in and out.
- jmalicki 5mo agoThe relative lack of trucks is what would identify the data center. The only other buildings like that are warehouses, which have a lot more trucks going in and out relatively speaking.
- hnlmorg 5mo agoIn rural areas maybe. But plenty of data centres are in cities too. And European cities are not generally known for an abundance of parking spaces.
- hirako2000 5mo agoYou can make a few phone calls. Maintenance is not avoidable until boston dynamics figure out how to clean the toilets at least.
- yabones 5mo agoIt could give you a rough idea, but it's far from precise. The delay added by a single router could throw you off by several KM. It's much more effective to just go through satellite imagery and land title records. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.01+ms+at+speed+of+light https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.01+ms+at+speed+of+lig...
- tcp_handshaker 5mo ago>> I wonder if you can uncover where the data center is just by using ping command. Not exactly, but you can uncover cloud providers like Google and Azure, who forget to tell you, their "availability zones" are in the same data center ;-)
- jmalicki 5mo agoAs long as they're on opposite sides so the same Shahed missile doesn't hit them both.
- kdheiwns 5mo agoBig tech's love for cheap labor is a great mechanism for finding where all their most valuable assets are and mapping out any and all vulnerabilities. I imagine state actors are applying to any and all low paying jobs that have seemingly juicy job requirements and feeling out details during interviews. Even better if you offer to accept a salary far below standard rates and actually get the job. While probably not a state agent, I've personally done online interviews with some people that were clearly lying about everything and trying to feel out details about the company. People claiming to live in our country and being citizens but having little ability with the language, saying they would love to come to our city but it's a bit far, saying they graduated from a major university but being unable to describe anything about the town (with their resume mentioning graduating from a different university, and their LinkedIn a different university from either), random people moving around and arguing in the background, all their work was with random crypto businesses that shut down within months. I had to stop my coworkers from saying too much. I had to convince them why hiring that person for remote work and giving them access to our servers was a bad idea. There are without a doubt companies giving similar people physical access to their hardware. And there are undoubtedly people who practice interviewing to better deceive companies.
- jmalicki 5mo agoJust look on satellites for giant buildings with no cars or semi trailers parked in the parking lots. I wonder if data centers will have to start doubling as automobile junkyards to conceal themselves.
- throwaway894345 5mo agoSome Paris data centers are disguised as apartment buildings with the classic Hausmannian facade, and then you open up Google maps and see a ton of AC units stacked on the roof. These aren’t likely major cloud data centers mind you, and the motivation for concealing them has more to do with the city’s aesthetic codes than military defense.
- breppp 5mo agoor less aesthetic versions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street#/media/File:AT&T_Long_Lines_33_Thomas_Street.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street#/media/File:A...
- jmalicki 5mo agoEven that isn't a serious data center (on the level of national security concerns). Wall St is run from Mahwah, NJ.
- time0ut 5mo agoSome data centers are more valuable as targets than others. For example, those comprising us-gov-east-1 and us-gov-west-1 or, god forbid, us-east-1. I don’t expect it is a difficult task to find them and other critical infrastructure for a state, but probably more involved than popping open google maps.
- jmalicki 5mo agoThe US government's security priority should be moving critical us-east-1 services into Cheyenne Mountain.
- walrus01 5mo agoYou can be secretive all you want, but it's extremely difficult to hide massive heat exchanging systems and/or generators from aerial/space photography. Particularly at the scale of an AWS-like datacenter. Building a fully camouflaged datacenter could be done at much greater cost, but you still can't hide its thermal emissions from infrared. Basically every watt hour used in a datacenter environment turns into waste heat ultimately rejected into the atmosphere (except for the 0.000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a fiber), so if you have N megawatts of waste heat from a rectangular shaped building located on a 300 x 400 meter sized plot of land, it's going to stand out.
- jmalicki 5mo ago> except for the 0.000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a fiber Realistically you're getting photons returned too.
- brianwawok 5mo agoHey my EV gets lighter at empty battery vs full.
- s1mplicissimus 5mo agoWouldn't it be possible to pipe away the heat to the next city and use it as heating there? That way the heat emissions wouldn't be as noticeable
- ceejayoz 5mo agoA project of that size is gonna be even harder to conceal.
- AngryData 5mo agoPossibly but it is a bigger and more obvious project than just the data center itself, would cost an ass ton of money, and would mean the cooling line itself is a standalone target to take the data center down.
- 5mo ago
- cheney_2004 5mo agoWhich is why peace and diplomacy is so important. The last thing we need is to be war hardening everything, which is likely impossible in this day and age.
- croisillon 5mo agoyour handle tho :D
- lostlogin 5mo agoCheney is just salty that targets weren't hardened before he shot his friend in the face.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- sourcegrift 5mo ago[flagged]
- CursedSilicon 5mo agoI'm sorry for the person you choose to be
- watwut 5mo agoConsidering fasvists has track record of starting wars, failing at diplomacy or intentionally breaking it and then forcing everyone else to deal with the problem ... op claim and intolerance to nazi are consistent.
- wolvoleo 5mo agoDiplomacy doesn't really help if you're the one starting the wars.
- fvdessen 5mo agoThat's why the SWIFT backup data centers in Belgium are camouflaged as posh villas (or so i've heard)
- mugivarra69 5mo ago[dead]
- robotnikman 5mo agoI'm surprised they did not build them in a bunker or other hardened location. The region is not exactly known for its political stability.
- malfist 5mo agoWhere's the next quarter margin in that?
- amelius 5mo agoCan't you use internet geolocation from a distributed botnet, and triangulation based on timing?
- dantillberg 5mo agoYes, and this could perhaps determine location within a few miles.
- qingcharles 5mo agoMaybe. I used to use this about 20 years ago, trying to track down where the UK root servers were so I could increase my drop-catching. Get test accounts on as many hosting providers as possible, check hops and ping times, move on to the next one. It's not as accurate as you'd hope, though.
- PunchyHamster 5mo agoHell, you just need to hit a transformer or two to take it entirely down for days if not weeks
- trhway 5mo agoOn the other side AMZN could have hired several RC plane hobbyists, fly them Emirates business class, put them into Burj Khalifa suites, fund several beefy jet, nitro or EDF planes for them (with jet getting as expensive as $5K), and have these guys on guard duty on the roof so they would take down any incoming drones (see Ukraine interceptor drones), and that would still be a pocket change compare to the datacenter damage. (of course somebody can get a startup going producing an automated container deployable unit consisting of like a 64 cell VLS with such interceptors plus radar plus optical - can be quickly deployed when necessary for example onto datacenters or say onto large ships navigating some treacherous waters ) More tech-y approach - AI (or even actual security guards) monitor the video cameras and once there are incoming drones, several MW of power can be redirected into those datacenter's large satellite dishes (more precisely - into very simple microwave generators installed on the dishes) and the dishes turned toward the incoming drones - the drones will get cooked in seconds, add the kitchen microwave sound effect. > A few cheap drones can ... It is temporary. The race is only starting. Soon you will have to have a hive of highly intelligent autonomous drones to have even slightest chance to make through a hive of highly intelligent autonomous interceptors, etc. The government based defense departments are very slow and expensive though, while the extremely valuable targets like the datacenters belong to the transnationals and located across the world (and more and more in space). Thus the transnationals would have to take care of the defense of their assets themselves (or outsource it to other transnationals, like say imagine AWS providing air-defense-as-a-service), more efficiently and agile than the government defense departments. If you take a look at Palantir Karp's book "Technological Republic" you can read that between the lines there too.
- booi 5mo agoThey can typically operate indefinitely on diesel generators and have hot supply contracts with multiple suppliers. Even our small rinky dink datacenter had that. So, it would generally be more effective to hit the actual datacenter than try to cut the power.
- arjie 5mo agoThey are not widely publicized but they cannot be entirely secret because when you use AWS Direct Connect you need to know where to do the work in. Not every AWS datacenter has Direct Connect, but any OSS intel person could do the work required. When you have sufficient incentive to know where (for instance, trading crypto) you will find out the difference between, say, a matching engine running in AWS's datacenter run by AT Tokyo or by Colt. AWS does not publicize all of their stuff, true, but they have partner documentation, their partners are proud to be vendors to Amazon and will advertise, and there are old unlisted PDFs on the Internet. Besides, Amazon has thousands of employees and contractors and their families. This kind of thing is within reach of any human being with sufficient interest.
- rescbr 5mo agoIn my country you can enumerate the branch entity tax IDs of any company and therefore very easily obtain the addresses of any data center.
- QuinnyPig 5mo agoIf you really want to know where the data centers are, the local Uber drivers and pizza delivery folks are a great source.
- naveen99 5mo agoModern warfare mostly targets military weapons: missiles against missiles… or financial weapons: oil price steering. Lawyers pens against lawyer pens. even military casualties are avoided. There is 0 appetite for senseless destruction of civilian infrastructure. You are thinking ww1,ww2 which are not modern anymore.