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577 points mooreds | 21 comments | | HN request time: 0.511s | source | bottom
1. zelon88 ◴[] No.42176687[source]
It's just practice. Locate the cables, establish a means of damaging them, deploy the means as a test and a show of force.

The western economy is almost completely built using off-prem in Cloud PaaS environments. It should be pretty fun when WW3 starts and not a single hospital, school, laboratory, or factory can operate.

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2. lxgr ◴[] No.42176897[source]
It also sends two messages: "We can do this to any of your cables", and "we're willing to" – with an implied "we could easily do it to all of them at the same time".

And the last scenario is the real problem: While there are enough cable repair ships to continuously handle a normal rate of simultaneous peak failures, fixing multiple cuts can quickly exceed their capacity. (There's nothing that says an attacker can only cut the same cable in one spot!)

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3. azeirah ◴[] No.42176935[source]
[flagged]
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4. jjeaff ◴[] No.42177099[source]
while outages definitely cause big problems in hospitals and schools, neither are completely dependent on connectivity in the short term. most hospitals are required to be able to operate critical services in an outage. even a full power outage. Schools will definitely be fine. they just may have a serious backlog of entering grades, absences, and payroll once things get back online.
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5. zelon88 ◴[] No.42177241[source]
> once things get back online.

That would be like trying to cold start a power plant without any power.

I think you're missing my point. I'm trying to point out that there are 3 "infrastructure providers" that our economy CANNOT live without. In a world war situation, these 3 organizations are going to be the biggest targets. They are literally our crown jewels.

They will be under continuous attack from all angles. As we know with security, it is a game of time. Even the strongest bank safe has a rating in hours that it can resist direct tampering. Beyond that time rating the safe offers little to no protection. It is the layers of security that keep the safe from being tampered with beyond its rating.

What I'm saying is, no target can be secured with 100% security guarantee. Even the most secure systems will fail if met with a concerted attacker with unlimited resources.

If WW3 starts, we will lose Azure, AWS, and GCP within 5 days and it will be more or less completely destroyed within 30 days. They won't survive concerted attacks from nation state actors during war time.

Even if they can't be hacked, they will be physically destroyed with kinetic weapons. There is no Bitdefender plan that will save them from warheads.

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6. 20after4 ◴[] No.42177691{3}[source]
Worry more about the power grid.
7. sofixa ◴[] No.42177750[source]
> The western economy is almost completely built using off-prem in Cloud PaaS environments

US and lesser extent UK. Companies in France, Germany, Spain, Italy are much less likely to use public cloud providers, especially for critical (customer data, critical for the business, etc.) services. Not that it doesn't exist, one of the premier health tech startups in Europe, Doctolib, is full AWS; but it's rarer and much less prevalent.

Source: I work in a US tech company and cover EMEA, and compare notes with American colleagues.

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8. sofixa ◴[] No.42177814{3}[source]
> If WW3 starts, we will lose Azure, AWS, and GCP within 5 days and it will be more or less completely destroyed within 30 days. They won't survive concerted attacks from nation state actors during war time.

The same probably applies to moist mainstream (public) datacenters. Only ones that will be safe-ish would be something like Scaleway's underground nuclear bunker/datacenter.

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9. inferiorhuman ◴[] No.42178098[source]
Right but how much of that is cloud shit hosted on a different continent?
10. TacticalCoder ◴[] No.42178183[source]
> It should be pretty fun when WW3 starts ...

Which may happen as some people just got Biden to authorize (honestly I don't think he can do that by himself), without congress approval, the use of long range missiles by Ukraine.

Some people are really hard at work trying to start WWIII.

I don't think it's the russian who severed those cables.

Russia knows that if WWIII doesn't start until a few more weeks, Trump is probably going to stop the US aiding Ukraine and stop the US giving its approval for total nonsense (like allowing these long range missiles weeks before handing over the presidency).

So why would Russia severe those cable?

I think there's a very high probability the bad actors here are the same that used Biden as a puppet to give Ukraine the greenlight to fire long range missile on to Russia.

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11. paganel ◴[] No.42178443{3}[source]
The Russian oligarchs have no say in any of this, they never have, people in the West still repeating this mantra almost 3 years since the war in Ukraine has started for good is a big part of the reason why the same West is close to military defeat there, they just refuse to acknowledge how Russia really operates.
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12. lopsidedgrin ◴[] No.42178525{4}[source]
>acknowledge how Russia really operates.

Enlighten us then. How would suggest Russia should be treated?

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13. tmnvix ◴[] No.42178593{3}[source]
At one time I believed Russia was responsible for sabotaging Nordstream. That was presented as the 'probable' and even 'obvious' conclusion. I no longer believe that.
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14. dang ◴[] No.42178701{3}[source]
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
15. Hizonner ◴[] No.42179531{4}[source]
What a moist data center might look like: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/5uvvnrHCuRmzZzyLZUQXNU-970...

Actually seems like a hardish target.

16. Aloisius ◴[] No.42179549[source]
> honestly I don't think he can do that by himself

Why not? They're not restrictions instituted by Congress. They were restrictions instituted by this and previous Presidents.

17. aguaviva ◴[] No.42179553{4}[source]
The "never have" part certainly isn't true.

For a certain period of time, they definitely had significant influence.

They just refuse to acknowledge how Russia really operates.

By and large they have, actually, which is why one seldom hears the "oligarchs" mantra these days.

In other words -- though you're correct in response to the flagged commment, in the bigger-picture sense, you're railing against a straw man.

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18. foogazi ◴[] No.42179672{4}[source]
> a big part of the reason why the same West is close to military defeat there

3 years of stalemate war right next door is not impressive at all - how far can Russia really project its power ?

19. paganel ◴[] No.42180432{5}[source]
In military/strategic issues they certainly never had anything to say, not even during the dreadful ‘90s.
20. paganel ◴[] No.42180434{5}[source]
Treated by whom?
21. libertine ◴[] No.42181923{4}[source]
To clarify your point, now you think it was also Joe Biden's "bad actors puppeteers" mystical figures who did it?