Re: Google hacked?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com>
Date: January 31, 2009 11:33:47 AM CST
To: dave () farber net
Cc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:   Google hacked?

Dave - I think we've learned from this one thing.  Google's  
infrastructure, like many other sites that have to cope with very- 
large-scale operations in real time, is not 100% free from weaknesses  
that can have a large scale impact.

I am assured by friends at Google that this was a bug, not an attack.   
And I was impressed by how fast they could respond.  Kudos for  
resiliency in their operations staff.

However, we can learn from this a larger lesson, which should only be  
a reminder.  One cannot prevent large-scale failures of systems.  I am  
sure that Google's ops team will see what they can do to prevent this  
category of failure from happening again.

But I'm reminded by the large scale releases of personal and private  
information by highly "secure" banks, etc. that we cannot insure that  
large scale events won't happen - they happen every day, despite the  
efforts of zillions of security and reliability professionals.  What  
we should do is do more analysis of failures and planning for "normal  
accidents" - this is just a wakeup call.





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