Google Data Center Hit by Natural Disaster

NEW YORK — Lightning struck one of  the data center of  Google four times last week, causing a tiny but permanent loss of data. An electrical storm on August 13 “caused a brief loss of power” to some of Google’s cloud storage systems in a Belgium facility. Backup power kicked in automatically and quickly, Google says, but a small fraction of data were unrecoverable.

googlehit

The data center powers the Google Compute Engine, a service for business customers who rely on Google’s massive servers to perform high-powered computing tasks. No consumer-facing services, such as Gmail, YouTube or Google Drive, were affected.

In its incident report, Google says that less than 0.000001{73e286255f8194ac3b1dced4eeed3e8ee658b795cb770d1b882a79304e7a95d4} of its Western Europe permanent disk space was lost.

Google said it was “wholly responsible” for the outage, and it urged affected customers to consider duplicating and storing their data through other services that it provides. The company said it lacks redundancies in its Compute Engine system.

“Google Compute Engine instances and Persistent Disks within a zone exist in a single Google data center and are therefore unavoidably vulnerable to data center-scale disasters,” the company said.

Aaron Trubic, managing partner of technology communications at Proper Villains, thinks Google did the right thing.

“As small as an overall issue it may be worldwide — it highlights the need to distribute data across multiple data centers as a silo of one can be vulnerable,” Trubic said. “Google knows this and I think this particular zone may be just last in line for that ‘upgrade’ in procedure.”

Google says it’s in the process of improving its systems, adding: “the durability of storage is our highest priority.”

“We have conducted a thorough analysis of the issue … and we are working to improve these to maximize the reliability of GCE,” Google said. “We apologize to all our customers who were affected by this exceptional incident.”

Hack released

For starters, the data dump includes the usernames, first and last names, and hashed passwords for 33 million Ashley Madison accounts. On top of that, the dump includes 36 million email addresses (more than 15,000 of which are US government email addresses), and partial credit card data, partial addresses, transaction data, and phone numbers for a significant percentage of users.

Ashley Madison website

It gets even worse, too. The profile data for pretty much every user is available in the dump, which means anyone can look through a find a user’s sexual desires , and their relationship statuses. Some of the associated names and other personal details will have been faked by the user to protect their identity, but naturally this won’t be the case for everyone.

The data dump also includes a significant amount of Ashley Madison’s internal documents, including contracts, sales techniques, employees’ Windows credentials, and even PayPal account details belonging to executives. The data posted online includes basically everything stored on the company’s servers, indicating this was a full-scale compromise of their IT infrastructure.

Many security researchers currently exploring the data dump, which is simply mammoth at 10 gigabytes when compressed, have confirmed that the information comes directly from Ashley Madison. The company themselves are yet to confirm the data dump is real, instead suggesting it contains fake information. However, many Ashley Madison users have been able to find their personal information among the dumped data, which indicates this is actually the real deal.

It’s unclear exactly what Ashley Madison will do following this massive, unprecedented hack of their systems. Many of their users are in for a bad time if the data is used for blackmail purposes, and you’d suspect the owners of the site – and possibly the hackers if they’re ever caught – will be in for a similarly bad time down the track.

” Be Well informed about Online Dating “

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