371
submitted 9 months ago by robocall@lemmy.world to c/world@lemmy.world

The Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine's Ministry of Defense claims that pro-Ukrainian hacktivists breached the Russian Center for Space Hydrometeorology, aka "planeta" (планета), and wiped 2 petabytes of data.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] gregorum@lemm.ee 19 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

A 45tb tape would cost me a consumer $98, 45 of them would be 2pb and cost a whopping $4,320, it would surely be even cheaper for a bulk order at non-consumer costs. Hardly difficult or costly.

it’s not just the cost of the tape (or whatever storage medium). it’s the cost of maintaining a secure off-site backup system. surely, you understand this, and how one is much more expensive than the other, especially at scale.

[-] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 9 months ago

2pb is nothing if we're talking about a small datacenter backed up by the government. That said, Russia has a history of special kind of dumbassery

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 3 points 9 months ago

I think the main problem is that if, for example, they got 1 million allocated in the budget for maintaining the server farm, after corruption and shit only 250k would be actually available

[-] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yeah that's the start of dumbassery. Next comes cutting corners

[-] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago

I can pretty much guarantee that the cost of creating an offsite backup is trivial compared to the budget used to collect and analyze those data. I can’t read Russian anymore and it’s probably not published in a discoverable way, but I’m going to offer up the possibility that the sat network, research scientist teams, sys admins, and everything else that goes into the portion of the Russian government’s budget for this work wouldn’t have even seen that as a rounding error. I’ve worked with US government budgets and I know how tight fisted committees can be, and while the USG isn’t Google in terms of writing checks for tech, and while the Russians are probably an order of magnitude or two poorer than our budgets, it’s still be a no brainer in terms of costs. Either they just didn’t think of it (which I’ve seen far more times than I can tell you about) or it got eliminated as a line item by some bureaucrats who don’t understand cost/benefit analysis (which we’ve all also seen), it wasn’t truly a cost thing. Compared to the price associated with sat launches and data analysis, $10-$20k/ month for data retention is nothing.

Also, I sort of suspect that these were dual use systems. When you’re talking about the sensing tech they’re using, there are the very obvious and direct intel applications.

[-] Marsupial@quokk.au 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Would they maintain their own private off-site backup or would they be in a cluster with other government agencies or renting out from a commercial operation?

The cost would be massive for you or I to utilise such services, less so for an agency, and it certainly isn't difficult.

I understand science is generally always under funded and there's probably some oligarch skimming off of their budget, but I still don't see this being the win they think it is in any form. I can only hope the climate data is not lost to all time.

[-] gregorum@lemm.ee 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Would they maintain their own private off-site backup or would they be in a cluster with other government agencies or renting out from a commercial operation?

nobody said they would. I’m just pointing out that the difficulty of backing up 45TB+ of computational meteorological data is a greater consideration than a bulk purchase of magnetic tape.

and, really, the carelessness with which you regard research and knowledge is pretty disgusting. don’t think you’re some hero for that. that’s hundreds of millions - possibly billions - of dollars of research and work let and hundreds of thousands of man-hours just gone. and, again, the data, the analysis, and the knowledge. just gone.

[-] Marsupial@quokk.au -2 points 9 months ago

What are you on about?

Like 95% of what you’ve just ranted about doesn’t even relate to my posts.

this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
371 points (97.2% liked)

World News

39001 readers
1022 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS