Ukraine’s HUR Cyber Strike Shuts Down Russian Military University, Erases 150TB of Critical Data

I work with huge data pools like this and IDK what your backups look like, this is going to cause a massive issue. Even with my crazy fast network with fiber channel connections, it still takes lots of time to move a TB of data. And unless its on tape or in a secured space, it probably cant be trusted.

This was massive. Glory to Ukraine!

150TB isn't unheard of for an institution. Some users here have more than that in their homelabs.

Maybe all the students shared drives? I know I had a couple hundred GB in mine.

High resolution still images and video will get you there pretty easily.

There are some in the datahoarder community pushing a PB.
They mostly store Linux ISOs.

A few seasons of TV shows.

I've got a good 5 TB of games. It's not that crazy an amount of data.

Training videos might do it

I have no idea what is or isn't a lot of data for a university beyond scaling how much stuff is on my own PC up by a few tens of thousand times, but surely it depends on what data was attacked? Like promotional / staff training content that's largely in video form would be a lot of space with very little consequence, but 150 TB of student records and research data that's all just databases would be a fucktonne of important stuff gone

It's not. I work at a research university and while our critical systems are much less than that—mostly datasets and documents—repositories for research and knowledge management information are full of media that's well over 150TB.

But...

destroying over 150 terabytes of enemy resources, including websites, databases, and file storage.

If it's more the databases, yeah, that's some huge damage. An information system holding 100GB of data could be the source of 20 years of pay, employee, org structure, access governance, IDs, the lot; gone. And all dependent systems to it go blind because they use that database to work, rather than storing their own copy of it.

However, we also daily backup those critical systems in multiple ways. This includes for ransomware. It can be destroyed and it doesn't matter unless the hacker knew about and was able to also hack an entirely different setup geographically located somewhere else with its own security and network independent to what we primarily rely on. A lot of our data is, by law, scheduled and retained on government systems too, but only every few months. So there's yet another hard hurdle to find out and attempt to breach. Get all three at once, yeah, you got us, but what an impressive and mammoth hack that would be.

When I was in school we had 1tb onedrive subscriptions provided by the school for about 3k people not including teachers. 150tb does seem quite small unless each student only gets 250gb or 500gb of storage