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So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable to prove land ownership but it seems that may be avoided.
So they rebuilt it first from first hand proof, then by testimonies, with a period of counter claims available IIRC. For sure there were some false claims, but given the magnitude of the disaster, this is the best solution within that context.
In a similar vein, I was once curious how you would prove your identity if ALL of your relevant documents (passport, driver's license, birth certificate etc) were lost in some kind of cataclysm e.g. a house fire pre-digital etc
Turns out there is actually a mechanism for this:
- get multiple people to sign sworn affidavits that you are who you say you are
- that begins the "paper trail" of evidence that allows you to start getting the rest of the document chain
- you rebuild from there.
If you're married, there is already a similar process for when a spouse takes the last name of the other spouse. The marriage certificate is the first step and then it goes from there for driver's license, passport, credit cards and so on.
Oddly enough, if you legally change your name, they will send you a new one regardless of the limit.
I got my first passport at a formative period of my life (international travel does that). I looked nothing like the photo within aa year. It served as a passport until it expired but only created skeptisism as a photo ID.
I don't know how to drive, so do not possess a driver's licence. I am in a 35+ year relationship, but unmarried.
The only purchase I have made on finance was a bed that I immediately paid off because the the only reason I did it was to establish a record. This was surprisingly difficult to do because they were reluctant to let me have the bed on finance because I had no credit record.
I finally had to renew my passport when I bought a house. It was the only way I could meet the id requirements.
Prior to that I was leveraging non-photo id that could only be acquired with photo-id. It seen that will be accepted in lieu in many instances and allows you to get more similar forms of non-photo ID. All you need to get started is to find a staff member fed up with the ridiculous rules enough to click the checkbox to say that they saw a photo ID. It helps that many of the staff in these positions are more aware of security theater than the general public.
Being a land owner means a lot of those days are peassed, I can't really prove I am the person who is recorded as owning the land, but mostly organisatipns are happy that I am claiming to be someone they know exists.
Linkedin has stopped asking. I'm not sure if that means they think I am a lost cause or that anyone not on their books by now doesn't actually exist.
Everytime I get stuck with some kind of circular bureaucracy I shout "it's Banana Joe all over again!" and no one understands.
A great-great grandfather of mine was mayor of a town through which the front passed twice during WWI. All that survived were basements. Your father's account more or less describes the process by which the land was reparceled.
So all is not lost if the registry goes up in flames.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23588202
[1] https://community.apryse.com/t/jbig2-compression-issue/1814
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2#Character_substitution_e...
[0]: https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0
[1]: https://youtu.be/zXXmhxbQ-hk
If the hacker was targeting the erasure of a particular recent transaction, they may well have succeeded. And by deleting numerous others, they have plausible deniability in the subsequent dispute over the property. If you just wipe a record that is related to you, and the manipulation is discovered (which it will be, one way or another), you are part of a narrow circle of suspects.
All you need is an append only tape or even a printer.
Interestingly in the Bangladesh Central Bank hack they used a printer to print out any transactions, but the intruders disabled it or it was just malfunctioning because it's a printer.
But I doubt the Romanians actually had such a system.
Also, you still have paper documents, kept by parties to transaction, right?
I had a copy of our code on media in my desk labeled “promotion” and updated it every month. In retrospect someone going through my desk would have assumed blackmail material and been disappointed to find only code.
The last thing any government will want to deal with is massive irretrievable data loss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_FrQnQv0Vw
/joking, i'm sure this is not a happy time for whoever is trying to rebuild everything
You know, it's not like people would come and steal your land overnight because you can't provide proof of ownership.
Plus having most of your net worth locked up in something no sane person would consider buying off you because you can't prove you own it is ... suboptimal
That's... a curious thing to have in the body of laws. What's its purpose and who does it serve?
When you buy property you get a deed for the land, but the details of a property can change after that. The deed also doesn't contain ownership, it just says what is on the land. It's common for land to have multiple owners (1/32 is not unheard of) due to inheritance.
I'm building a house, the land deed just has the land plot as we bought it, until the house is 100% finished (and registered) we will not get an updated deed, although the digital system has newer data (you need to register the construction progress).
Property that isn't registered can remain unregistered but must be registered before it is sold.
Just recently I've seen a 30 y.o. deed on some commercial property. Despite it was valid and predated the digital era, it had almost nothing common with the things on the ground.
The digital copy is just that; a digital copy.
The hacker would have to destroy the database and all backups, and also burn down the building holding the registry.
Even if the digital records were completely lost, they still have the paper ones.
> being unable to prove land ownership
People know who owns what, there are also paper contracts of ownership which are more authoritative than the digital records.
It's literally not a requirement to have it all online. And the cost of developers, plus coding + security updates + platform costs, really just means you replace a few assistants which would process requests by hand, with all that.
Except? It's a lot harder to hack a person to delete all the files in the office, from 10k km away, than via a computer.
So many things simply don't need to be online. So many things simply are better archived by other means. So many things are safer, more secure, and the backup processes (microfiche, etc) are well understood and just work.
And of course everything didn't work perfectly, it did however work "perfectly fine", which means "very well" or "good enough". Meanwhile, adding in network connectivity to anything vital these days is just insanely dumb.
No software is secure, and will never ever be secure. Ever. Anyone who thinks that software can be made secure, is 100% wrong, period. My point is that the advantages aren't worth the disadvantages.
A sophisticated genius hacker in a different country can’t touch your paper records, but an absolute moron with a bic lighter can destroy records just as effectively. Hell, an irresponsible clerk can do an incredible amount of damage just by misfiling things.
Duplication literally doubles costs in the physical world, and has the downside of being very hard to keep in sync. A bank keeping paper ledgers would be absolutely fucked if they had to switch to a backup ledger that was more than a few hours old.
On net, I believe that digitalized documents are a net improvement.
Put some desktop-size tape robots in several government building closets, and task someone with switching tapes weekly, and you can achieve more reliability than multiple huge paper archives.
The real danger is that we’ll be so careless we’ll discard other enduring ways of doing things before we smarten up to their particular benefits.
My hope is that disciplined people still have an intuition for this, even among the digitally steeped. Sysadmin/ops types tend to a culture of diversifying backup location and even media type. Maybe that can reach back to human legible hard copy.
If we start thinking along the lines of technology has risk and we shouldn't use it, we should go back all the way to the discovery of fire as we all know fire can cause a lot of damage if in the wrong hands.
In as software is not secure, and can not be made secure, using it for important records storage makes zero sense, unless you a) have full backups offline in physical, non-digital, read only medium or b) just don't do it online, at all.
And my point is, it's not worth the convenience.
accidental communism
When I was responsible for backups we kept the tape cartridges in a fire safe in a different building. We took a full backup weekly and moved the tape from the robot to the firesafe as soon as the backup was complete. Only the daily incremental backups stayed in the robot for more than a day.
> spinning up a new shard takes a quarter
Both can be true
You would need to understand first how they gained access and verify that they can’t do the same again. That in itself could take days if not weeks. Then of course they might have found new vulnerabilities while they were in, so you would need to worry about that too.
Yes, even hundreds of them sometimes.
The most time consuming part of recovering from an attack is validating everything. It takes more than a few hours to validate the infra that stays put isn’t compromised, the IaC code itself isn’t compromised, deploy the infra, bring a copy of the offline backup of your data (your IaC can’t drive to another site and bring the backups, then make a copy, unless tou are really sure you removed any trace of compromise), validate that the backup is sound, then restore it.
In some cases the infrastructure part is the least time consuming. Some platforms are straight forward enough that even manual deployment is fast. But after a hack you can’t trust anything so you need to do the slow validation that takes longer than your projected “hours”.
> In some cases the infrastructure part is the least time consuming. Some platforms are straight forward enough that even manual deployment is fast. But after a hack you can’t trust anything so you need to do the slow validation that takes longer than your projected “hours”.
Your IaC is supposed to be on those offline backups too, and should be able to do everything from clean hardware.
The most time consuming part is to identify what caused the compromise. After that, you can put everything back online and then at the same time start to analyse who did it/what they did and so on. If the root cause for the breach is identified, you also know the time most likely and can trust the offline IaC backup.
ANCPI announced that it had begun migrating its applications to Romania’s Government Cloud. The operation is being coordinated by the Special Telecommunications Service (STS) and is expected to be completed on Wednesday, July 22.
After the migration, authorized institutions will inspect the applications and data and prepare a report on the condition of the systems and any additional measures required. Based on that report, ANCPI will announce an estimated date for restoring its applications. Services will be brought back online gradually, according to operational priorities.
ANCPI says it is rebuilding its database from backup copies stored in several locations. The agency rejected reports suggesting that it did not have sufficient backups, explaining that the use of multiple storage locations provides redundancy and allows data to be restored after cybersecurity incidents.
According to ANCPI, affected systems must remain isolated until every identified vulnerability has been addressed. Although shutting down the services has caused temporary inconvenience, the agency says the measure was necessary to protect the data and ensure that operations restart safely and reliably.
The restoration of the IT infrastructure is described as a complex process being conducted in cooperation with the relevant authorities. ANCPI has also confirmed that a criminal investigation is underway, but no official conclusions can yet be released.
The agency warned that claims circulating publicly about the alleged consequences of the attack are not based on official information and do not reflect the current state of the investigation.
The dumb thing was the bank was two blocks from the data center and less than eight (six?) from the office so catastrophic events might have hit both or all three. The owner kept a second copy at his house, and that was the only geographically separated copy.
This proclamation, coming from a governmental organization, makes me afraid they are doomed. Effectively they are saying they are fixing the mistake by repeating it.
What they should do is admit fault. Freeze the system. Get independent expert help.
Best wishes, recent Romanian land buyers and sellers
Edit: thank you @cbg0 for giving us this update
At the same time they are working with authorities.
Not everything needs an external consultant.
Specifically:
- government gives IT/data contracts to cronies
- cronies don't actually do any real security work to protect the data
- things like this happen
In this case I expect an underpaid employee, and at most an incompetent nephew of someone. They had no reason to have an .authorized_keys file in the webroot of the website, and yet they did.
If you want to know what "dedicated contracts" look like in practice they are overly specific requirements than can only match a single business. The best example that comes to mind was when one county needed to buy busses (or vans) and the maximum length admitted was bellow the most common options, but as luck would have it a nephew of a cousing of someone with decision power (or something like that) just so happened to be the one importing cars that precisely matched the specs.
Here is one I learned recently - govt started issuing birth certificates online. Hopefully Less corruption, right? Officials made deliberate spelling mistakes in names etc, because you have to go in person for corrections. In person means bribe, which means back to same situation as before (almost)
The amount of times my SSN and correlated info has been leaked and I've been offered a free year or credit monitoring is depressing.
Corruption and oppression are signaling and coordination problems. The illegitimate sovereign is exploiting informational assymmetry: they know your neighbors are just as angry as you, they know it because all the walls have ears.
They need to prevent you and your neighbors all knowing it at the same time. Your best play is to find some signal, something difficult to censure, hard for the goons to pick out in a crowd but legible to your neighbors. If you all knew that the first guy to shove back when the cop shoves you is going to be followed by a swarm of guys? Very easy to find the first guy in that case.
This is why shit like extremely high gas prices scares the shit out of illegitimate sovereigns: they're the ones posting pure data about why everyone should be that angry right now.
A close relative, government employee, was in charge of building a new application. They have nobody in that entire organization of several thousands people that know how to write specifications for an IT application, nobody that knows how to design, test and deploy it. This is because some government employees have decent salaries, but in IT the private sector is paying a lot more, so almost anyone remotely competent is going to the private sector. So in this case an organization of non-IT people had to deal with the contract and all the associated problems - there is no need to guess, it did not go well. That kind of project could have been done properly with ~ 10% of the budget in the same timeline.
I have a friend that worked as a developer in such a government IT project. The project cost was ~ 5-10 times what was worth, a chain of sub-contractors did the work, less than ten competent people doing the project, charged by the bid winner for over 100 people and actual staff was around 70 at most, for a short period of time.
Both projects above are in Romania. Lack of competent people in the projects, especially in decision roles, was the main problem.
> Sources told Risky Business that the hacker entered using valid credentials
Like whenever someone gets caught in a compromising situation they say they "were hacked", as if saying that means anything.
It's even more funny on Reddit when you can see the person who is blaming cronies in his Romania but has posts of him doing some blue-collar work in the Midwest.
Algeria has a extradition treaty with Romania:
https://periodicos.processus.com.br/index.php/egjf/article/v...
Withno external backups piecing together all the lost functions must havebeen hair raising, and more forensic archeolgy than data recovery.
Last i heard i think they had restored a quarter of the lost services/data.
[1] https://www.intermediagroup.org/south-korea-data-loss/
The whole country's real estate market was paralyzed for about a month. It took couple of months to restore everything from backups and paper agenda and resume normal operation of the land register office.
It was the largest cyber attack in Slovakia's history. The authorities to this day haven't provided any information on who might be behind it. The investigation is still ongoing. Several government figures including the PM were however very eager to immediately point on Ukraine, without any sort of proof.
"1T+ in assets are frozen as Slovakia's Land Registry faces ransomware attack" <https://spectator.sme.sk/politics-and-society/c/news-digest-...> (9 Jan 2025) HN discussion (1 comment): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42650343>
"Ransomware Attack Paralyzes Slovakian Land Registry, Souring Slovakia-Ukraine Relations" <https://dailysecurityreview.com/security-spotlight/slovakian...> (January 14, 2025)
"Slovakia Hit by Historic Cyber-Attack on Land Registry " <https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/slovakia-hit-by-l...> (10 January 2025)
Apparently tied to Ukraine in this case.
Lord no! That accusation doesn't pass the sniff test.
Try looking further east for the real culprits.
If you've specific information clearing or establishing the link, post it. I agree that hasty accusations are risky. The main point I was looking to establish was that the source wasn't indicated as Algerian, as with the Romanian incident.
Posts and screenshots apparently by the alleged attacker show "P@ssw0rd" and other well-known / readily-guessable passwords from the hacked systems:
<https://spear.cx/Thread-Selling-RO-Thy-arss-shall-be-spanked...>
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iZc93XfViOk7izusgIG1ni7Kmsx...>
Originally noted, without references, by ExoticPearTree here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48978836>.
NB: If you're going to point out stupidity verging on cliched tropes, do so with sufficient evidence that it doesn't read as a tired and unsubstantiated canard. The fact that this does happen (and apparently did) doesn't mean it's necessarily the case in any specific instance.
Blizzard gave hardware tokens out to the entire convention one year. Smart phones became a variable not long after and then they didn’t make them mandatory but game guilds almost universally did. Especially for officers.
Possibly since 1086
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book
Registration is now compulsory on sales, but that only came in in 1990.
As to what I mean by binned, I mean literally binned, thrown away.
3 2 1 people.
If your production system at most runs a backup to a drop site, then your backup facilities pull down versioned backups from there, you can better ensure older backup files are intact. More so by not allowing the two to see each other at all and not using backup accounts from a system that can access production resources.
This, to me, is the more interesting bit of the article.
I don't really know what a good solution looks like, but yeah, that's annoying.
mirror that DB onto a server on the other side of the country, or continent, etc.
Moving from a paper registry at each county clerk (in the US) was a part of the 2008 financial meltdown.
If stored properly.
So are digital copies, though. If stored properly.
News at 11.
Permissions inside the database should be segregated. The credential used by the webserver should not have enough permissions to DROP DATABASE. Just the appropriate selects/updates/inserts.
Likewise, if you are storing backups on the same network (as opposed to a tape backup), network permissions should allow writes/creates but not deletes.
Why does full access include the ability to delete read only data that should never ever be deleted for the rest of time?
It's like building a self destruct button that ignites the physical records. It's an unnecessary risk to make such a dangerous thing.
> Sources told Risky Business that the hacker entered using valid credentials
This is social engineering or corruption.
There's a growing (retarded) perspective, not only here in Romania but in most of the EU, that we must digitalize at all costs; this itself is obviously not a problem, but it usually comes with the removal of the "traditional" options too. The same goes for payments (removal of cash) and basically every aspect of the administration/society where this could be applied. The most recent concrete example for Romania is the mandatory digital signature by ANAF (IRS equivalent) for all companies.
Unlike other regions of the West: NA/WE/rest of the West (SK, JP, etc.), in EE, people (*younger generations, explained below) don't often think about the aspects of confidentiality that much, or if they do, they usually apply it incorrectly (either IRL [filming in public] or online ["I've accepted a draconian TOS that gives the company rights to all of my data, but I haven't actually read any of it, and now I'm invoking my "GDPR rights" against said company."]).
It does not take a genius or a historian to observe that while the older generations do not have this "problem" (they're very skeptical of the gov. [at least in certain aspects], in an almost american fashion — explained by the fact that they've experienced communism), younger generations position themselves in the extreme opposite; they despise the older generations ("boomers") for being luddites and somehow blame them for the gap in civilizational progress between WE and EE. There is a legitimate point here, of course, but it should be noted that the argument is almost always presented in an emotional, overwhelmingly irrational fashion, and almost never includes comparisons between the centralization done by the state in the past [communists] and the new one attempted by current govs [but digitalized]. (This delves into a broader socio-cultural divide between the generations that includes other aspects like religion, traditions, etc.)
The biggest portion of the so-called "IT people" who call for this "digitalization wave" are midwits, "inverse luddites" (they don't care about the implications), and, in smaller numbers, grifters and second-order beneficiaries (on the "digitalization" gov. projects). Obviously, it should be mentioned that, despite progress, nepotism and corruption are still present, and there are cases where gov. contracts are not given to the best candidate.
As a person who's both working in the IT sector and not a boomer (despite the impression of my comment), "we" should be careful about enabling totalitarians in our endeavors."Hackers" is just one reason out of a multitude of other reasons for not abandoning the sacred paper (see the ES+PT incident one year ago).
It did help the West, and especially the UK, to get as immigrants very high good plumbers and handy men. The rest of us went into STEM and are now working for FAANGS.
The intent of abolishing private property would presumably be the latter.
It is a poor idea to use blockchain for government registries. If you want transparency, simply publish signed daily updates and that's enough. Just use simple DB with backups, and optionally, a printer printing changes on a paper.
Also, SQL database is much more convenient to use, it has query language and indices unlike a blockchain.
Now you may argue "that is a blockchain, not every blockchain is associated with a shitcoin" but to be frank that ship has sailed, if you wanted to defend that you'd have had to do a lot more work over the past decade.
What do you mean by "More Work" here?
There were plenty of tests and pilots of systems like that described. Dual goals of reducing the cost of transferring property and publicly attesting all current ownership. Real lawyers and real lawmakers developed proposals to integrate these sort of services with current public land registries.
The issue as far as I see it isnt the "work" its the "antiwork". If you want to learn about land sale nft pilots you literally have to put -metaverse into the google search to weed out the metaverse nonsense. Theres just too much noise around blockchain for even the best signal to penetrate. The stupid monkey nft guys really fucked the whole space. Probably take another decade to dig out all the toxic waste from blockchains reputation.
A blockchain is essentially that, just with the daily update that's being signed also including the signature and hash of the previous day.
Blockchain as a technology is actually useful here. It does not mean automatically that blocks have to be mined by third parties, although pseudocurrencies have gone that route for decentralization reasons.
Blockchain doesn't have anything esp. to do with data loss. It solves exactly one problem which is distributed double spending in accounting ledgers.
What's wrong with paper records backup up a digital record and audit trail. This all seems like a solution for a non-problem to me.
It's not. Blockchains are only eventually consistent among nodes. They're designed for synced backups among adversarial peers.
There's no reason for a government agency to use one internally. There are better ways to sync backups when the people with access to make updates are also authorized to do so.