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Re:Ottawa Bitcoin exchange defrauded of $100,000 in cyber cu... by viraptor on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @10:08AM (#7421984)
It looks like it's time to use full disc encryption even in datacenters now. (there are scripts available to startup ssh and allow remote password input before mounting root)

The problem is that it does require manual intervention on reboot and may not be very useful for 100s of machines.

Re:Ottawa Bitcoin exchange defrauded of $100,000 in cyber cu... by wyager on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @11:11AM (#7422384)
I feel like that has a very limited scope of usefulness. Datacenter machines are on 99.9% of the time, and generally speaking, thieves don't go through the trouble of stealing hard drives from datacenters.
Re:Ottawa Bitcoin exchange defrauded of $100,000 in cyber cu... by rainforest on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @11:30AM (#7422503)
In this case the wallet was stolen from the machine after it was rebooted into single user mode. With FDE the machine wouldn't have been usable when it was rebooted so the attack wouldn't have worked.
Re:Ottawa Bitcoin exchange defrauded of $100,000 in cyber cu... by viraptor on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @11:31AM (#7422508)
Did you read the article? The server was rebooted into rescue mode and data has been read directly off the disk. You don't need to steal the drive to execute that.
Re:Ottawa Bitcoin exchange defrauded of $100,000 in cyber cu... by PeterisP on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @10:28AM (#7422091)
Do you need FDE for that? It would be feasible to encrypt just the BTC keys; the server can reboot automatically but needs repeated authorization in order to access the BTC.
Re:Ottawa Bitcoin exchange defrauded of $100,000 in cyber cu... by viraptor on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @11:33AM (#7422520)
I believe only FDE would help in that case. Otherwise anyone having access to the rescue mode could just replace the binaries on the server to send you the key (and all the bitcoins) after it was used.

Actually even right now I hope the server has been rebuilt from scratch along with grub and everything. If they just restored the server as it was left, for all we know they could be running a rootkit or a hacked version of bitcoin daemon.

Re:Ottawa Bitcoin exchange defrauded of $100,000 in cyber cu... by corresation on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @11:42AM (#7422575)
Data centers offer many critical advantages (redundancy of power, argon fire suppression, networking and cooling), but I question the notion that they offer greater physical security than, for instance, an in-office server rack.

They have gates and retina scans and cameras, but they have these things specifically because many strange and mysterious people are allowed in very close proximity to your servers: It is a compensation for the greater risk that the environment naturally presents, rather than being above and beyond the normal security.

But it does nothing to defend the physical security when security is theater (which it almost always is, and where social engineering easily circumvents it), or when employees of the data center are a potential threat, as are the many other customers of the data center are the threat.

People can get on aircraft and through international borders with assumed identities. They can certainly get into a data center, especially given that customer service always prioritizes convenience ("Something must be wrong with your retina scanner. Anyways I really have to get to that server now". In most situations, you'll be getting in).