Kyiv’s HUR Cyber Corps attacked Russia’s North Caucasus University, destroying over 150 terabytes of data and weakening the training of technical specialists for Moscow’s military.
I have no idea what is or isn’t a lot of data for a university beyond scaling how much stuff is on my own PC up by a few tens of thousand times, but surely it depends on what data was attacked? Like promotional / staff training content that’s largely in video form would be a lot of space with very little consequence, but 150 TB of student records and research data that’s all just databases would be a fucktonne of important stuff gone
I have no idea what is or isn’t a lot of data for a university beyond scaling how much stuff is on my own PC
Yeah, judged on a “home user” scale 150TB may seem like a lot but it really isn’t when you’re talking about Government / University / Enterprise.
Just one of the servers I have under management is currently using 49TB and there’s another one in that rack using 40TB. That ~90TB (over half of what’s in the article) for just two servers in a single rack at a single company.
I didn’t say anything about how much storage I have on my PC? I just said my only point of reference is my personal hard drive scaled up by that number, not how that actually compared to the 150 TB number. I’ve got 2 TB on my PC, but it’s only about a quarter full and a substantial chunk of that is games anyway. All my work and personal projects take up less space due to just being the kind of thing that doesn’t need a big file to store
I said it’s a fucktonne of data gone if it’s data that is relatively small in terms of file size per amount of information stored. If I lose a million words of a novel I’m writing I’m going to call that a huge amount of stuff lost even though the file size is probably somewhere around a megabyte. I did not at any point comment on whether or not 150 TB is a lot of storage for an organisation like a university in and of itself; the bit about my point of reference was specifically to illustrate that I have no idea if it is or not
It’s not. I work at a research university and while our critical systems are much less than that—mostly datasets and documents—repositories for research and knowledge management information are full of media that’s well over 150TB.
But…
destroying over 150 terabytes of enemy resources, including websites, databases, and file storage.
If it’s more the databases, yeah, that’s some huge damage. An information system holding 100GB of data could be the source of 20 years of pay, employee, org structure, access governance, IDs, the lot; gone. And all dependent systems to it go blind because they use that database to work, rather than storing their own copy of it.
However, we also daily backup those critical systems in multiple ways. This includes for ransomware. It can be destroyed and it doesn’t matter unless the hacker knew about and was able to also hack an entirely different setup geographically located somewhere else with its own security and network independent to what we primarily rely on. A lot of our data is, by law, scheduled and retained on government systems too, but only every few months. So there’s yet another hard hurdle to find out and attempt to breach. Get all three at once, yeah, you got us, but what an impressive and mammoth hack that would be.
This is where similarities stop. IMO many Russians view any sort of law as guidelines on how to not get caught. I wouldn’t be surprised if any money that was supposed to be spent on backups was spent but without anything to show for it.
When I was in school we had 1tb onedrive subscriptions provided by the school for about 3k people not including teachers. 150tb does seem quite small unless each student only gets 250gb or 500gb of storage
150TB doesn’t seem like a lot for a whole university. Am I missing something?
I have no idea what is or isn’t a lot of data for a university beyond scaling how much stuff is on my own PC up by a few tens of thousand times, but surely it depends on what data was attacked? Like promotional / staff training content that’s largely in video form would be a lot of space with very little consequence, but 150 TB of student records and research data that’s all just databases would be a fucktonne of important stuff gone
Yeah, judged on a “home user” scale 150TB may seem like a lot but it really isn’t when you’re talking about Government / University / Enterprise.
Just one of the servers I have under management is currently using 49TB and there’s another one in that rack using 40TB. That ~90TB (over half of what’s in the article) for just two servers in a single rack at a single company.
BIG data amounts are measured in Petabytes or Exabytes.
You only have 5 GB on your PC? How do you survive?
I didn’t say anything about how much storage I have on my PC? I just said my only point of reference is my personal hard drive scaled up by that number, not how that actually compared to the 150 TB number. I’ve got 2 TB on my PC, but it’s only about a quarter full and a substantial chunk of that is games anyway. All my work and personal projects take up less space due to just being the kind of thing that doesn’t need a big file to store
But you did.
150 TB / 30,000 = 5 GB
There is more involved in the formal proof, but I think that’s a good summary of the facts.
I said it’s a fucktonne of data gone if it’s data that is relatively small in terms of file size per amount of information stored. If I lose a million words of a novel I’m writing I’m going to call that a huge amount of stuff lost even though the file size is probably somewhere around a megabyte. I did not at any point comment on whether or not 150 TB is a lot of storage for an organisation like a university in and of itself; the bit about my point of reference was specifically to illustrate that I have no idea if it is or not
*sigh
I remember when my 386 had a 40mb hard drive.
It’s not. I work at a research university and while our critical systems are much less than that—mostly datasets and documents—repositories for research and knowledge management information are full of media that’s well over 150TB.
But…
If it’s more the databases, yeah, that’s some huge damage. An information system holding 100GB of data could be the source of 20 years of pay, employee, org structure, access governance, IDs, the lot; gone. And all dependent systems to it go blind because they use that database to work, rather than storing their own copy of it.
However, we also daily backup those critical systems in multiple ways. This includes for ransomware. It can be destroyed and it doesn’t matter unless the hacker knew about and was able to also hack an entirely different setup geographically located somewhere else with its own security and network independent to what we primarily rely on. A lot of our data is, by law, scheduled and retained on government systems too, but only every few months. So there’s yet another hard hurdle to find out and attempt to breach. Get all three at once, yeah, you got us, but what an impressive and mammoth hack that would be.
This is where similarities stop. IMO many Russians view any sort of law as guidelines on how to not get caught. I wouldn’t be surprised if any money that was supposed to be spent on backups was spent but without anything to show for it.
Even for a military university, I’m inclined to agree. I would not be at all surprised if that were the truth.
You could buy vodka instead of backup media and it’s not like anything will go wrong
When I was in school we had 1tb onedrive subscriptions provided by the school for about 3k people not including teachers. 150tb does seem quite small unless each student only gets 250gb or 500gb of storage
When I was in school, back in the day, we had about 10 GB of storage for ~10,000 students.
We allowed 100 MB per student, but didn’t have even remotely enough space for them all to use that much. Probably 50-60% never even logged in.
Yes we backed it up to tape and could restore it as needed.
Was this in the late 90s?
Because like 99% of the users don’t use more than a couple hundred megabytes.