Mystery malware destroys 600k routers from a single ISP during 72-hour span

Re:Mystery malware destroys 600k routers from a single ISP d... by sebzim4500 on Thursday May 30, 2024 @02:00PM (#40526731)

Is that actually feasible with their budget?

If we are generous and assume there a zettabyte of data a year that they want to store.

At consumer prices, you would have to pay $10B per year just buying hard drives yet alone the operational costs/redundancy.

The budget for all of the US intelligence services is ~$65B. I think if they wanted to actually do what you are describing it would be the single biggest intelligence expense they have and I don't see how you hide that.

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Re:Mystery malware destroys 600k routers from a single ISP d... by gary_0 on Thursday May 30, 2024 @02:44PM (#40527258)

And you don't need to go that far to establish an information dictatorship anyways. China does just fine on a relatively modest budget. Plus nowadays you can easily spin up an ML model to identify "potentially incriminating" data while throwing out "probably just browsing cat pictures". And rubber hoses are still cheap.

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Re:Mystery malware destroys 600k routers from a single ISP d... by choilive on Thursday May 30, 2024 @09:03PM (#40530462)

Its not. They don't store the raw IP packet data, instead they store the metadata (this was revealed in a leak a long time ago), like the type in this article (data source and destination, timestamps, size of the data, etc.) the metadata is orders of magnitude less data than the raw packets and likely easily compressible, so I wouldn't be surprised if they keep it all for a decent chunk of time.

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Re:Mystery malware destroys 600k routers from a single ISP d... by sebzim4500 on Friday May 31, 2024 @05:49AM (#40533096)

Presumably this becomes increasingly useless in an eSNI world?

i.e. they can prove I visited a bunch of cloudflare sites, but there are millions of those so who cares?

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