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.
Which 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.
Some 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.
>> 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 ;-)
The 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.
That'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.
Big 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.
You 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.
Geothermal exists, but you would have to take care to design accordingly and even then there are plenty of other ways for a state actor to locate you. It probably doesn’t make much sense to spend money trying to hide from state actors; it’s probably better to (1) avoid conflict prone areas to the extent possible and (2) make it expensive for an attacker to shut you down (use more smaller data centers within a sensitive region, put some of them underground, etc) or (3) accept the risk of data center disruption.
I'm surprised this reportedly only affected 19 server racks. Some of the small FPV quadcopter strikes I've seen videos of have collapsed entire homes. Even if the structure is more resilient than a fragile home, I would have expected the blast from a larger long-range drone like a Shahed to damage more server racks than that.
It's either 100lb or 100Kg, with a direct hit on a dense centre, it would damage a lot of racks, but if it's oblique, or indirect, impartial, the damage could be less pronounced. They could also be misrepresenting by diminishing the damage as there's a lot of information suppression going on.
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.
That's why the SWIFT backup data centers in Belgium are camouflaged as posh villas (or so i've heard)
Which 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.
Just 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.
Some 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.
I wonder if you can uncover where the data center is just by using ping command.
It 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+lig...
>> 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 ;-)
As long as they're on opposite sides so the same Shahed missile doesn't hit them both.
You can find data centers by looking for hvac units in satellite photos.
You can make a few phone calls. Maintenance is not avoidable until boston dynamics figure out how to clean the toilets at least.
Probably also grid connections like size of transformers and if there is prominent number of trucks going in and out.
The 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.
That'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.
Big 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.
You 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.
Wouldn'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
Geothermal exists, but you would have to take care to design accordingly and even then there are plenty of other ways for a state actor to locate you. It probably doesn’t make much sense to spend money trying to hide from state actors; it’s probably better to (1) avoid conflict prone areas to the extent possible and (2) make it expensive for an attacker to shut you down (use more smaller data centers within a sensitive region, put some of them underground, etc) or (3) accept the risk of data center disruption.
> except for the 0.000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a fiber
Realistically you're getting photons returned too.
"Stops billing" makes it sound generous. If those regions can't run customer apps, not charging for them is just the minimum.
I'm surprised this reportedly only affected 19 server racks. Some of the small FPV quadcopter strikes I've seen videos of have collapsed entire homes. Even if the structure is more resilient than a fragile home, I would have expected the blast from a larger long-range drone like a Shahed to damage more server racks than that.
It's either 100lb or 100Kg, with a direct hit on a dense centre, it would damage a lot of racks, but if it's oblique, or indirect, impartial, the damage could be less pronounced. They could also be misrepresenting by diminishing the damage as there's a lot of information suppression going on.
The sheer amount of metal on every rack makes DCs very dense
Thanks 2nd Epstein War for all the fuck up in the world.