Gone in 90 minutes: Data from 4,000 servers

An ex-Fannie Mae employee has been indicted for attempting to sabotage computer systems at the company by hiding a deadly time bomb into daily start-up scripts. Based on reported news so far, the former employee was motivated by his recent firing due to a unrelated performance issues.

What is chilling about the case is the narrow window of just 90 minutes in which the code changes were inserted, or some hours before access was removed. If not for the chance discovery by another staffer, some 4,000 servers containing millions of files would have their files and backups deleted and thrashed to an extent that each would have to be individually rebuilt. If that's not bad enough, consider the fact that the payload was primed to activate many months later--the ex-employee would, in all likelihood, not have been caught amidst the crippling data loss.

If anything, it really does make one consider more secure systems.

On a more cheery note, you will be glad to know that progress is being made on the data security front. The Trusted Computing Group (TCG), which consists of the big players such as Seagate, Hitachi, Toshiba and Fujitsu, has released the final specifications on the technical details to implementing storage encryption on the hardware level.

Even as this remaining barrier against the rapid take-up of storage encryption is eliminated, we can expect data breaches resulting from unencrypted data to finally be a thing of the past. - Paul