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The Batshit Crazy Story Of The Day Elon Musk Decided To Personally Rip Servers Out Of A Sacramento Data Center (www.techdirt.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Back on Christmas Eve of last year there were some reports that Elon Musk was in the process of shutting down Twitter’s Sacramento data center. In that article, a number of ex-Twitter employees wer…

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[–] 38 points 2 years ago (1 child)

It's effectively a case of "I left my house unlocked and unarmed while I went on vacation. No one broke in, so I don't see the point in door locks and alarm systems."

Twitter got very VERY lucky that the worst that happened was some outages.

They moved hyper sensitive user data in a moving truck. If anything had gone wrong they would've exposed millions of peoples sensitive data.

You are supposed to wipe the servers before you move them, you shouldn't be driving servers around on the highway while they are still chock full of peoples credit card info and shit.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    What sensitive data does Twitter hold? Genuinely curious

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    We don't know what was on those servers, but it was apparently sensitive enough that the government redacted descriptions of the data in court filings.

    The US government brief said the relocated servers were not wiped before being moved to a new data center. The type of data on the relocated servers was apparently so sensitive that it could not be described in the US court filing, which redacts the sentence that describes what the servers contained.

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/us-government-slams-musk-in-court-filing-describing-chaotic-environment-at-x/

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Isn’t all of it encrypted though? Like I understand physical access to servers is generally bad, but you’d think once the the things are unplugged it would be difficult to access the data again without bypassing encryption. I’m not a software engineer though

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I'm a security engineer, and encryption is great, but can be bypassed. Relying on encryption assumes it was implemented properly, that the system was shut down properly so all keys were flushed correctly, and the encryption algorithm doesn't have weaknesses.

    Generally if somebody dedicated enough can acquire physical access to a system, they can probably find a way into it given the right resources. Did that happen here? Probably not. Could it have? Absolutely. That's why most enterprises or government hard drives are shredded rather than just relying on them being wiped or encrypted.

    Encryption is part of the solution, but it's not automatically the complete solution.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You don't consider credit card info sensitive? May I have yours?

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  • [+] -7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    BS, I don't know if Twitter holds credit card data, but if they did, they would have needed to abide by PCI DSS rules, which requires encrypting the data in special hardware security modules.

    So no, moving those servers wouldn't put the data at risk.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    encrypting the data in special hardware security modules

    Tell me you don't understand how PCI works without saying you don't understand how PCI works.

    Those systems can very much store PCI data and it's very much possible that those were the systems that contain information as most of the times it's on general servers.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Personally identifiable information (PII) is any set of data that has a chance to uniquely identify a person, including name, address, credit card info, social security, etc. It can also include things like birthdate, city, IP address, and so on, depending on how the combination of data works. The general rule of thumb is that you want to aggregate out to the city level at least, or completely anonymize the data. These, I’m supposing, we’re raw records that contained account info.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Isn’t all of it encrypted though? Like I understand physical access to servers is generally bad, but you’d think once the the things are unplugged it would be difficult to access the data again without bypassing encryption. I’m not a software engineer though

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