Posted on 05/31/2024 12:27:33 PM PDT by Red Badger
Earlier this month, Google's cloud platform deleted the entire customer account, including some backups, of UniSuper.
Why it matters: Fortunately for the $135 billion Australian pension fund's 647,000 members, some of UniSuper's backups on Google Cloud's servers and elsewhere were salvageable, and the fund was able to recover its data, teaching us all a lesson about having multiple redundancies.
What they're saying: This was not a "systemic issue," Google says.
"An inadvertent misconfiguration" during a setup left a data field blank, which then triggered the system to automatically delete the account. The big picture: Google is having a rough 2024. In addition to this mishap, the company is reeling from its AI Overview debut and its disastrous AI-generated image tool launch.
Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect that some of UniSuper's backups on Google Cloud's servers were not erased.
Like Google Maps telling you to take a left, then take a left, then take a left, then take a left, ad infinitum.
Had that happen to me more than once.
And with a bigger hard drive.
If you don’t have the data on your own computers, you don’t own it.
I can restore any data that existed on my computer at at 3AM on any of the following dates. You’d think that a trillion dollar company could do better...
20161231
20171231
20181231
20191231
20201227
20211231
20220630
20220731
20220831
20220930
20221031
20221130
20221231
20230131
20230228
20230331
20230430
20230531
20230630
20230731
20230831
20230930
20231031
20231130
20231231
20240131
20240229
20240331
20240430
20240512
20240519
20240524
20240525
20240526
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20240530
I work in cybersecurity. One of the domains is disaster recovery which is the ability to recover compute and recover data. There has been a disturbing trend in the last 5 to 10 years to “trust the cloud”. Folks, the need for backups does not go away just because your systems are “in the cloud”. “cloud” is not some magic wand that makes all of your problems go away.
I actually took part in a disaster recovery drill where we rebuilt our data center at an offsite location. It didn’t go that well for me, as the tape drive hardware we were given to use was different from ours, and they didn’t have the drivers. Whoops.
If the account had been completely erased including all copies would that mean that Google has expropriated the fund. It is all funnymunny I suppose but could google have transferred the funds to itself as the “erasure” was done? Then again if all the accounts google holds were to be erased it would go a piece toward lowering inflation?
“Anyone who would design a system that was this vulnerable should not be in IT!”
UniSuper had backups, stored them at a different site, with a different service, and restored successfully from those backups. So props to their IT team. They had a system and a plan.
But shame on Google’s team for a flaw this bad.
$135 billion here, $135 billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
And that is how easy the government is going be able to make your money disappear after they switch all currency to digital.
It’s good to have your own backups, either locally or with another “cloud” service. I can easily imagine some bean-counters saying “it’s too expensive to have a second backup system, Google knows what it’s doing”.
On a separate point, was having the field in question blank even valid, given its disastrous effect? If not, why wasn’t there an error message when the configuration was applied? (Or a warning, if the blankness was valid but unusual?)
“The Cloud is safe!..............”
What is One Drive? Is that a cloud?
I believe so........
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