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.
One side of me wants to cheer the Ukrainians, but the other laments that they… “hurt science”. I wish they could have stolen the data before they wiped it so it wasn’t lost, but that’s a lot of data to swipe.
I get it, it’s just I’m sad all of that knowledge was lost. Space Hydrometeorology isn’t really relevant to war-waging. It wasn’t a strategic target.
I will drink two toasts tonight: one for Ukraine’s victory, and one to lament lost knowledge.
I agree with you completely. Any time knowledge like this is destroyed, it illicits the same feeling for me as thinking about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
Fuck russia, but also fuck destroying knowledge in the name of war…
I wish they could have stolen the data before they wiped it so it wasn’t lost, but that’s a lot of data to swipe.
Ukrainian hackers could cryptolocker it and exchange the keys for Ukrainian POWs.
I am sure somebody would get suspicious if the servers are on 100% CPU + IO to encrypt 2 petabytes especially if you encrypt the data in place.
striking a vulnerable Russian target was political.
Nothing like “science progresses us” more like “this data hurts people”
these are not the same. and, these Ukrainian hackers probably were more badass techies than trains on discriminate strategic targeting, so they hit whatever had the weakest security. like, I get it, but if someone sat them aside for five minutes and explained that this data is valuable to humanity, and should, at least, be preserved, they would have thought twice before deleting it without preserving it— or, at least making sure the Russians had backups. (maybe they do?)
also, as I mentioned, this action is only sorta embarrassing, not statically useful. it’s not military or strategic/spy data they deleted. this cyberattack doesn’t damage any infrastructure or anything related to war-making. it was an indiscriminate attack based, certainly, on opportunity, not static planning.
given Ukraines recent… budget issues, I think that their innovation in drone attacks in one front they should continue to invest in both because its cheap, but also minimizes casualties. the other they should now explore is cyberwarfare. And cyberattacks should be strategic in nature. They should disable, immobilize, and/or destroy a target. Destroying priceless knowledge is just wrong and benefits nobody.
I see all the comments saying Ukraine targeted non-military entity. But IMO, Russia can get fucked. I am not sure if they shared the data with anyone, or kept it to themselves, but no loss.
For sure they use it for war purposes.
They sure as fuck aren’t using it for climate research. They dgaf about climate.
Ed: hack was maybe part of a bigger defense strike: https://euromaidanpress.com/2024/01/27/ukrainian-cyberattacks-cripple-russian-defense-contractor-weather-center/
Following that logic, civilians should be fair game because “Russia can get fucked”.
I disagree wholeheartedly with the idea of collective punishment.
It’s very easy to turn collective punishment into discrimination and genocide. This solves nothing and only creates more problems.
I agree but this seems to be an attack on a military contractor, similar to if Russia attacked Lockheed martin. Sure Lockheed does civilian stuff but they actively help the military. I am not sure what the UN says about it, and it certainly isn’t the same as Israel collectively punishing Gaza.
I suppose everything has nuance
When the people accept this kind of behavior (of Putler), then they can’t have it nice, either.
I’m sorry, are you saying that genocide (which is what Russia literally is doing in Ukraine)is bad? Because again, that is literally what Russia is doing in Ukraine.
This is a target because it’s information can be (fuck that, IS) important and be used in the Russian invasion efforts. It’s a legit target
Are you saying that just because Russia is doing a genocide, doing a genocide to Russia would be justified?
Ever heard the saying “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind”?
This has got to be the most peculiar downvoted comment I’ve seen on lemmy so far. A principled disagreement with collective punishment? Weird.
Edit: what am I missing? Or have I stumbled into a part of lemmy that is totally fine with stuff Nazi Germany did, and present day Israel and Russia are doing?
They’d be morons if they didn’t back up important data off site.
Have you ever seen any academic IT systems? They are all underfunded ans run by grad students.
Even worse, they are often a case of accretion by generations of grad students and undergrads.
E.g. a university was redoing how it hosted student club websites. When it eventually killed the old hosting, 1 site stayed working. It was eventually tracked down to a little mini pc mounted above the false ceiling. It had been plodding away for 20 odd years, most of that without any maintenance at all.
The only reasonable excuse for attacking this data was that it helped the Russian war effort. Eg. flying in supplies, planning offensives, missile and UAV flight planning, etc.
Planeta is a state research center using space satellite data and ground sources like radars and stations to provide information and accurate predictions about weather, climate, natural disasters, extreme phenomena, and volcanic monitoring.
That’s just fucking stupid of them.
This massive volume of information would be difficult and costly to store in backups, so if Ukraine’s claims are true, this is a catastrophic attack on Planeta.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Technically with 45tb they mean “45tb of highly compressible text”, actually is 18tb.
And raw images aren’t compressible
With a catch like this the genius marketing could call them “100 petabyte tapes” (only if you store zero-filled files)
So it needs more tapes and the drive itself is also very expensive, around $10k, and it’s not something that a Russian government entity can access easily today, but needs to be bought from grey market resellers with higher markup.
Then needs a dedicated server for that, a person (or a robotic arm) that changes the tapes every few hours, temperature controlled off-site storage…
