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.

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.

  • QuokkaEnglish
    20•10 months ago

    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.

    • gregorumEnglish
      19•10 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]English
        14•10 months ago

        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

        • @[email protected]English
          3•10 months ago

          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

      • @[email protected]English
        3•10 months ago

        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.

      • QuokkaEnglish
        0•10 months ago

        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.

        • gregorumEnglish
          2•10 months ago

          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.

          • QuokkaEnglish
            -2•10 months ago

            What are you on about?

            Like 95% of what you’ve just ranted about doesn’t even relate to my posts.

    • @[email protected]English
      16•10 months ago

      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…

    • @[email protected]English
      -1•10 months ago

      Yes, but that makes the propaganda sound bad.

      (you also need the tape read/write machine and a storage system, but those aren’t that expensive either).