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Comment by PeterStuer | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure they had dozens of process heavy cybersecurity committees producing hundreds if not thousands of powerpoints and word documents outlining procedures and best practices over the last decade.

There is this weird divide between the certified class of non-technical consultants and actual overworked and pushed to corner cut techs.

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The data seems secure. No cyberthreat actors can access it now. Effective access control: check.

Ironically, see the phrack article someone linked above

I like the definition of security = confidentiality + integrity + availability.

So confidentiality was maintained but integrity and availability were not.

Ironically many of those documents for procedures probably lived on that drive...

I dont know why but cant stop laughing. And the great thing is that they will get paid again to write the same thing.

You jest, but I once had a client who's IaC provisioning code was - you guessed it - stored on the very infrastructure which got destroyed.

If you are one of the big boys (FAANG and other large companies who run physical infra) you will have this problem as well. The infra systems run and replace themselves and if something fundamental breaks (for example, your deployment system requires DNS, but your DNS servers are broken, but you cannot deploy to fix them as the deploy service requires DNS).

From what I have seen a lot of time the playbooks to fix these issues are just rawdogging files using rsync manually. Ideally you deploy your infrastructure in cells where rollouts proceed cell by cell so you can catch issues sooner and also implement failover to bootstrap broken cells (in my DNS example, client could talk to DNS servers in the closest non-broken cell using BGP based routing). It is hard to test, and there are some global services (like that big Google outage a few months ago was due to the global auth service being down).

Here's a 2024 incident:

> "The outage also hit servers that host procedures meant to overcome such an outage... Company officials had no paper copies of backup procedures, one of the people added, leaving them unable to respond until power was restored."

https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/power-failed-spacex...

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