https://computer.rip/2024-11-09-iron-mountain-atomic-storage.html
'I have quipped before about "underground datacenters," and how they never
succeed. During the late decades of the Cold War and even into the '00s, the
military and (to a lesser extent) the telecommunications industry parted ways
with a great number of underground facilities. Missile silos, command bunkers,
and hardened telephone exchanges were all sold to the highest bidder or—often
in the case of missile silos—offered at a fixed price to the surrounding land
owner. Many of them ended up sealed, the new owner only being interested in the
surface property. But others...
There are numerous examples of ex-defense facilities with more ambitious
owners. There ought to be some commercial interest in a hardened, underground
facility, right? After all, the investment to build them was substantial.
Perhaps a data center?
There are several ways this goes wrong. First, there are not actually that many
data center clients who will pay extra to put their equipment underground.
That's not really how modern disaster recovery plans work. Second, and probably
more damning, these ventures often fail to anticipate the enormous cost of
renovating an underground facility. Every type of construction is more
expensive when you do it underground, and hardened facilities have thick,
reinforced concrete walls that are difficult to penetrate. Modernizing a former
hardened telecom site or, even worse, missile site for data center use will
likely cost more than constructing a brand new one. Indeed, the military knows
this: that's why they just sold them, often at rock-bottom prices.
Even if these "secure datacenters" almost never succeed (and rarely even make
it to a first paying client), they've provided a lot of stories over the years.
CyberBunker, one of the less usual European examples (a former NATO facility),
managed to become entangled in cybercrime and the largest DDoS attack ever
observed at the time, all while claiming to be an independent nation. They were
also manufacturing MDMA, and probably lying about most of the equipment being
in a hardened facility to begin with.
So that's obviously a rather extreme example, sort of a case study in the
stranger corners of former military real estate and internet crime. But just
here in New Mexico I know of at least two efforts to adopt Atlas silos as
secure datacenters or document storage facilities, neither of which got off the
ground (or under the ground, as it were). It seems like a good idea until, you
know, you actually think about it. You might recall that I wrote about a secure
data center claiming to be located in a hardened facility with CIA and/or SDI
ties. That building doesn't even appear to have been hardened at all, and they
still went bankrupt.
What if I told you that they were all barking up the wrong tree? If you really
want to make a business out of secure underground storage, you need something
bigger and with better access. You need a mine.'
Via Violet Blue’s
Cybersecurity Roundup: November 19, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-19-116282410
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
