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Peter Gabriel's Web Server Stolen

Posted by timothy on Tue May 06, 2008 01:14 PM
from the maybe-just-a-disgruntled-fan dept.
Data Storage Media Music
miller60 writes "Web servers hosting musician Peter Gabriel's web site have gone missing from their data center. "Our servers were stolen from our ISP's data centre on Sunday night — Monday morning," reads a notice at PeterGabriel.com. The incident is the latest in a series of high-profile equipment thefts in the past year, including armed robberies in data centers in Chicago and London. How secure is your data center?"
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Firehose:Peter Gabriel's Web Server Stolen by miller60 (554835)
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  • Heist! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by warriorpostman (648010) on Tuesday May 06 2008, @01:15PM (#23313950) Homepage
    Wow. It never even occurred to me that people would execute traditional bank-style heists of data servers.

  • Cleary (Score:5, Funny)

    by hansraj (458504) on Tuesday May 06 2008, @01:16PM (#23313952)
    It's a handiwork of music pirates!
  • Peter Gabriel isn't the first musician to be a victim of equipment theft. Earlier in the millennium BT and Hybrid suffered major setbacks in the making of long-awaited new albums when their computers were stolen. I remember being royally pissed when Hybrid's Morning Sci-Fi [amazon.com] , already generating a lot of buzz based on the band's material at concerts, was delayed years just because some dumbass saw shiny electronics in a studio and walked off with them.

  • You know what they say about hacking... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MozeeToby (1163751) on Tuesday May 06 2008, @01:19PM (#23314004)
    If at first you don't succeed... buy a gun and go there in person.

  • Stop the Madness! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06 2008, @01:21PM (#23314026)

    Peter Gabriel's Web Server Stolen
    This is, this is just utterly devastating.

    The repercussions of this show what kind of destruction something like this can bring ... Wikipedia's page on Gabriel is grinding to a halt as millions of confused people log on to figure out who he was ... tens, maybe even hundreds, of people are rushing to change their credit card number after they realize that they purchased something through that website ... and on top of all that, this sudden rush back into the spotlight just might cause Gabriel to release another album, possibly setting popular music back decades again.

  • Stole it himself (Score:5, Funny)

    by WilyCoder (736280) on Tuesday May 06 2008, @01:22PM (#23314038)
    Gabriel stole it from himself. He's jealous of Rick Astley's recent fame. He wants an internet Peter-roll using "Sledgehammer"...

  • layer 1 hijacking (Score:5, Funny)

    by flynt (248848) on Tuesday May 06 2008, @01:24PM (#23314074)
    A similar method of attack, layer 1 hijacking [packetstormsecurity.org] has been around at least 10 years now.

  • Probably not very (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KeithIrwin (243301) on Tuesday May 06 2008, @01:26PM (#23314114)
    There was a talk at ACM CCS a couple of years ago by a guy who specialized in physical security. He runs a company which works as site security testers. He told of being hired to check how secure a client's computers were in a "secure" data-center. The servers were in a floor-to-ceiling cage with a padlock and security cameras. All they had to do was to fake some passes to get into the data center and then either go under the floor or over the ceiling. In this data center, as in most, there was about a 2-foot crawlspace below the floor and another one above the ceiling. Floor-to-ceiling cages don't mean much if you can just go around them, and that's how many "secure" data-centers are set up. Likewise, the security cameras are only useful if someone is watching them, and in the places he tested, no one was. Since he was only testing, he didn't actually steal the machines, but he did put stickers on them to prove that he'd been there.

    So, how secure is your data center: probably not very.

    • Re:Probably not very (Score:5, Interesting)

      by eln (21727) on Tuesday May 06 2008, @01:37PM (#23314254) Homepage
      It blows my mind that people who have a raised floor, and presumably go down into the raised floor all the time in order to run cable or whatever, wouldn't realize that people could get under a cage through the same mechanism.

      At the data center where I work, all of the cages are extended beyond the raised floor down to the concrete. Sure, if you had a heavy enough set of bolt cutters you could get through, but the metal detectors and security guards should keep you from getting something like that into the building. Plus, the fact that you would have disappeared under the raised floor for several minutes while you cut through the cage should be noticed.

      Granted, I work in a Tier IV data center (getting through security is like going to the airport every morning) and don't expect such a high level of security everywhere, but I would think extending the cages beyond the raised floors (and dropped ceilings if present) would be a no-brainer and would be done at very little cost. In addition, I would think at the very least having cameras on and recording 24/7 shouldn't be that big of an expense.

  • Hey, RIAA scumbags. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06 2008, @01:30PM (#23314158)
    That is stolen music.

    Now you can tell the difference.
  • I have a friend whose co-located server went down. The Linux partition was screwed, and it needed a reinstall something fierce. I couldn't reach him (he was on vacation), so I drove down to the provider to grab the box. They did not so much as ask for my name; they just let me in, said, "go on in the machine room and grab it." This perturbed me a bit (because the machine clearly had a label that said "Property of [not me]. Do not touch."), but I went in, took it, brought it home, and fixed it up. When I brought it back (with a new install of SuSe and the then newly-released 2.6 stable), the techs remarked that the owner's roommate showed up to see what was wrong with the server. Having been told that an unnamed individual was allowed to make off with the server, he threatened to call the police. The service provider's response to him was, (and I quote), "fuck off."

  • Get a better DataCenter (Score:5, Interesting)

    by noc007 (633443) on Tuesday May 06 2008, @02:04PM (#23314612)
    The company I work for has all of its servers in a secure colo. The place offers secured cabinets, secured cages with racks, and even does walled off areas of the datacenter floor with a secured door for high paying customers like Google. The facility is manned 24/7 with cameras all over outside and in. The rear of the facility is fenced and gated.

    If you're on the roster for your company with floor access this is the process you have to go through to even get to your server:
    -If it's at night, you have to use your RFID badge to get in the front door
    -Check in with security and sign out for your key if the door is not a combo lock
    -Security needs to buzz you through the first door
    -RFID badge and finger print through two or three doors
    -Iris scan in the man-trap to get to the datacenter floor
    -Combo or the checked-out key to get in to the cabinet or cage

    On regular intervals they check the people on the floor to make sure that you're suppose to be there.

    I'm not saying this place is a fortified facility that can handle a team of insurgents. However, I'd feel that my equipment is safe from the theft I've been hearing about at some datacenters. For a cabinet with a 1Mbps commit data rate with an actual 10Mbps internet connection and IPs, it's about the same cost of having a T1 to the office.

    For those that want to know who we use, it's Quality Tech.

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