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.
1024 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
I see all the comments saying Ukraine targeted non-military entity. But IMO, Russia can get fucked. I am not sure if they shared the data with anyone, or kept it to themselves, but no loss.
For sure they use it for war purposes.
They sure as fuck aren’t using it for climate research. They dgaf about climate.
Ed: hack was maybe part of a bigger defense strike: https://euromaidanpress.com/2024/01/27/ukrainian-cyberattacks-cripple-russian-defense-contractor-weather-center/
This has “they deserved it” energy.
Yes, they did
Following that logic, civilians should be fair game because “Russia can get fucked”.
I love how we’re equating loss of data to loss of human life.
Taking a “this is justified because fuck Russia” line of logic to its logical conclusion is not the same as equating data loss to loss of human life.
Ukrainian civilians are fair game to the Russian military, so…
I disagree wholeheartedly with the idea of collective punishment.
It’s very easy to turn collective punishment into discrimination and genocide. This solves nothing and only creates more problems.
I’m sorry, are you saying that genocide (which is what Russia literally is doing in Ukraine)is bad? Because again, that is literally what Russia is doing in Ukraine.
This is a target because it’s information can be (fuck that, IS) important and be used in the Russian invasion efforts. It’s a legit target
Are you saying that just because Russia is doing a genocide, doing a genocide to Russia would be justified?
Ever heard the saying “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind”?Are you saying that just because Russia is doing a genocide, doing a genocide to Russia would be justified? Ever heard the saying “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind”?
They can put that phrase on Ukrainian tombstones. /s
A data hack/destruction is not genocide.
I’m not talking about this case and this data. I’m talking about the take of people above on how things should be handled.
Derpgon said “russia can be fucked” regardless of whether it’s a military or civilian target.
Maness300 pointed out that collective punishment can easily turn into discrimination. That is, there’s a big difference between “XYZ is bad, because it’s aiding Russian military” and “XYZ is bad, because it’s Russian”
Phoenixz points out that Russia is committing genocide, as if it’s a counter argument to the previous statement, somehow.
I point out that just because Russia is committing genocide, it doesn’t make it right to slip into “XYZ is bad, because it’s Russian” and use that as justification to do anything you want to the country and its people.
Maness300 is right: targeting entities of any country for the action of said country, regardless of whether the entities in question are responsible, or even capable of influencing the actions, is not a good idea. It will lead to more problems.
I, for example, don’t support the US selling weapons to Israel. Should go and set the closest 7-eleven on fire? It’s an American company, so, clearly, it’s a valid target, right?
I agree but this seems to be an attack on a military contractor, similar to if Russia attacked Lockheed martin. Sure Lockheed does civilian stuff but they actively help the military. I am not sure what the UN says about it, and it certainly isn’t the same as Israel collectively punishing Gaza.
I suppose everything has nuance
This has got to be the most peculiar downvoted comment I’ve seen on lemmy so far. A principled disagreement with collective punishment? Weird.
Edit: what am I missing? Or have I stumbled into a part of lemmy that is totally fine with stuff Nazi Germany did, and present day Israel and Russia are doing?
Should have old it for randsome
The only reasonable excuse for attacking this data was that it helped the Russian war effort. Eg. flying in supplies, planning offensives, missile and UAV flight planning, etc.
They’d be morons if they didn’t back up important data off site.
Have you ever seen any academic IT systems? They are all underfunded ans run by grad students.
and here we have underfunded science with lots of russian corruption on top
real chance of backup system money disappearing in pockets…
Even worse, they are often a case of accretion by generations of grad students and undergrads.
E.g. a university was redoing how it hosted student club websites. When it eventually killed the old hosting, 1 site stayed working. It was eventually tracked down to a little mini pc mounted above the false ceiling. It had been plodding away for 20 odd years, most of that without any maintenance at all.
You’re insulting grad students. ;) But yea, I imagine it is very underfunded!
Soviets are morons, so they didnt.
Someone’s gonna fall off a balcony for this then.
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I will also eat two toasts tonight one because i am hungry and the other because i am also hungry.
I am sure they have offline backups. Also sometimes most of the data is garbage in the sense we collect anything in case we need it.
I wish they could have stolen the data before they wiped it so it wasn’t lost, but that’s a lot of data to swipe.
Ukrainian hackers could cryptolocker it and exchange the keys for Ukrainian POWs.
I am sure somebody would get suspicious if the servers are on 100% CPU + IO to encrypt 2 petabytes especially if you encrypt the data in place.
I agree with you completely. Any time knowledge like this is destroyed, it illicits the same feeling for me as thinking about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
Fuck russia, but also fuck destroying knowledge in the name of war…
Weather forecasting is actually really important for military operations. Consider weather advisories for aircraft, for example. Or planning an offensive on a clear day.
That said I don’t know if this place was doing climate science or weather forecasting (or both).
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.
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…
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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
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
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.
That was a non-military target.
That also harmed science.
That kind of targetting is what I expect of Russia, but if Ukranians are doing it to, then it means they’re losing their ability to discern who the proper targets are, vs who the not proper targets are, and are assaulting more indiscriminately.
Not wise, Ukraina, sorry.
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The civilian script kiddies did that or the Ukrainian government? In both cases…yeah, they are being kinda moronic and harmful by destroying research.
Oh no not SCIENCE
THEY HURT SCIENCE YOU GUYS 😭
being “science” doesn’t make make it harmless.
good meteorology supports military operations.
if it hurts russia’s accuracy in predicting weather, it helps Ukraine’s chance for surviving this war.
nobody says this particular action was a top priority, but every little resistance against the russian genocide helps.
It was actually military R&D that helped develop meteorology to the point it is today since predicting the weather even inaccurately can be a decent boon in warfare.
The heavy water plant the Germans set up in WW2 was also “science” and it’s still a good thing that it was sabotaged.
Hell yeah, score another point for the anti-science team!
Crime: 😡
Crime, Ukraine: 🤩Erasing data that is used for military reconnaissance in a hostile country is not a crime.
Let me guess, would you approve ukraine burning libraries in russia? It is a hostile country where every single russian is hostile, after all. Libraries are a source of knowledge and knowledge can be used for war. Even educational institutions need to be shut down as they aid in research for war related purposes.
If they set up a military installation inside a library with the purpose of harming Ukraine, then yes. Aside from that, this is a ridiculous comparison.
Manslaughter is a crime. How would you defend your country when the enemy is killing your people?
If ukraine hacks and deletes nasa’s servers would you still defend ukraine or label people calling out the perpetrators as nationalists? Replace russia with america and your perspective changes dramatically.
Sure I wouldn’t. I’m quite thankful they hacked Russia instead.
Last I checked, USA is not invading Ukraine right now
