Swiss Fort Knox - High secure data center inside the Swiss Alps | Hacker News Reader

Swiss Fort Knox - High secure data center inside the Swiss Alps

swissfortknox.com

47 pointsFredericJ27 comments

During the previous .com craze (2000-ish), I was at a Mercedes data center around Munich that was build in a former WWII bunker. The allies, when they captured it, decided against blowing it up because (according to our guide at the time), blowing it up would take so much explosives that it would leave a several-kilometer large crater and destroy all glass windows for 10's of kilometers around. They had some pictures of how (during the conversion to data center) they used wire saws ten of meters long to saw through the 5 meters of concrete thick walls. Pretty impressive.

That said, it seemed like the thick walls were more of a sales gimmick than actually being useful. Whether a wall is 10 or 5000 cm of concrete, no burglar will get through; and when there really is a nuclear war going on, the safety of the servers of the majority of companies in there wouldn't matter a bit.

We've got loads of German bunkers here in Jersey and I often think of what else they could be used for. Our neighbour has converted one to a totally soundproof media room, for example. The larger ones are of historic value and are being restored, but there are some good reasons to use the medium-sized ones for server rooms.

The temperature is naturally very cool inside, and they all have superb ventilation due to the air filters installed in case of chemical attack (Hitler was gassed in WW1 and so obsessed with gas locks & ventilation).

Physical security, that's obvious. Even those that were partially destroyed after the war were made safe by pouring more concrete to re-seal them.

A highly-interconnected island with Gigabit broadband and multiple links to the UK & France.

Hey, if anyone is interested in building 'Data Bunkers' this is a damn good place to start. The local government is pretty business friendly, too.

Jersey => Channel Island, correct?

Yes, we are right off the French coast.

Here's some background on the WW2 history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Channel_Isla...

I love that so many of my favorite James Bond fantasies are coming to life nowadays, with a modern, internet twist!

Where's the room where you can sit and stroke the cat on your lap?

I realy realy want the facilities staff to have color coordinated jumpsuit uniforms and hard hats.

Red for security guards of course :-)

Do you think equipping them with Mp40's would be going to far.

It seems strange to me that they piggybacked on the Fort Knox 'brand'. Now if something untoward happens at Fort Knox, their brand is impacted too.

Seems like a missed opportunity to make the most of the aura of quality that 'Swiss' has (I like 'Swiss Fort' better).

What is going to happen to Fort Knox? Is a madman going to blow up a nuclear bomb inside of it, irradiating the gold for thousands of years?

Ok, you're right, it's far fetched.

Fort Knox is a huge place though. I was thinking along the lines of a guy going on a shooting spree or something. The Fort Knox child massacre, that kind of thing. Very very unlikely I guess. Or someone starts up a Fort Knox site on Tor, and in the end lots of people get scammed.

It just seems incongruous to me to have a bunker in the Swiss Alps, more or less the pinnacle of safety, and then call it after something on the other side of the world.

Is physical security that big of a problem to solve? I think the more pressing issue would be attacks through their nice data connection.

As long as cold boot attacks are an issue, physical security is a big win.

But promising research might make it a thing of the past. http://privatecore.com/vcage/

A more detailed article about it: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2010/11/features/20-...

So, if I may ask, for the small time host, where and with whom do people consider things to be... "reasonably" secure?

I'm less concerned about catastrophic physical destruction than I am about e.g. the Swiss equivalent of a national security letter / remit /warrant / whatever. Physical security is nice with respect to securing the physical hardware from unwanted access.

I used to manage a site that did nothing nefarious, but that did accumulate some rather personal discussions.

As I've considered whether to do so again, I've wondered where the hey I would / should host it, these days.

We always policed fairly strongly, including to e.g. removing copy/pastes of full news articles. The place was never about "law breaking". But I don't want to facilitate Agency X, BigCo Y, or SocialScum Z in their efforts to flesh out personal profiles from the server end, nor to throttle "reasonable" conversation.

I suppose the answer is "nowhere", these days. But maybe there is still a relatively "next best thing".

NSA now deciding where they can place a splitter...

I'm guessing they're already on the client list.

Looks like a really nice place for a bank vault, yes. But does physical security matter that much for the IT sector? If so, these ridiculous security measures are worth nothing if not accompanied by very, very heavy digital security solutions.

P.S. Why didn't they start a bank in there? Is banking too mainstream already?

Does physical security of bank vaults still matter that much nowadays? Most of your money is stored in bits and that applies to the super-wealthy at least as much as for the mere mortals. It's certainly still important, but the "we'll steal tons of gold and valuable papers" is probably getting old.

There is quite a few "datacenters" in bunkers in the Swiss alps and I guess in other places. Physical security does matter in many cases such as when a bank is storing tapes in a secure location without them being connected.

Often the servers are only storing a small amount of the information that is stored in the whole installation.

Physical security seems insignificant these days when all it takes is a government order to access any data they please.

The client I work for has his servers in this thing, and I'll probably get to visit it soon. I'd rather they had a whisky bar and a place to smoke cigars installed somewhere in there.

Still, looking forward to seeing it for myself.

One of my professors told us that UBS mirrors its whole data center to another one located in a mountain. Does anybody know if it's this particular thing? Or are there more than one of this?

From the Wired[0] article posted above[1]:

"Oschwald[Co-Founder of Swiss Fort Knox] can tick off blue-chip companies such as Cisco Systems, Novartis, UBS and Deutsche Bank among his clients."

[0]: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2010/11/features/20-... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612298

This looks to me like bin Laden's Mountain Fortress, the one Donald Rumsfeld told us about:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2011/05/bin...

Man, I love the style of this image. Anybody know a collection of these kind of images?

Looks like something out of Cryptonomicon.

Good marketing gimmick for security....the things enterprise solutions are made of

"Sabotage proof, high-performance cooling system"

"Uninterruptible power supply"

Yhea....

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