C[omp]ute

From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>

Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 13:29:36 -0300 (CLST)

Calan - the U of Chile's Astronomy Dept - was cracked last night.  The
system was not very secure, so it was no great feat.  What's more unusual
is that the crackers then deleted data on many disks, including the backup
array.  Many astronomers have lost years of work.

Only home directories were backed up to tape.  Astronomy data tends to be
large, and kept on separate "data" disks.  Important data was duplicated
on more than one disk and/or on raids, I believe - teh copies were deleted
too.

I don't have all the info - it's not clear if the disks had just the
directory structure removed, or whether they were reformatted, but I
understand that the sysop doesn't think the data is recoverable.

This shows a significant down-side to disk based backup.

Andrew

-- 
personal web site: http://www.acooke.org
personal mail list: http://www.acooke.org/andrew/compute.html

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