Protect your data
On war with Iran, cloud storage, and whether data centers can be hardened infrastructure
It may be an exaggeration or a convenient re-framing of unrelated events, but Iran is claiming to deliberately target Amazon Web Services infrastructure with weapons amid the conflict with the United States. Any such claim should be reviewed critically, but even the effort to claim the behavior is a fairly new development in armed conflict.
■ Cybersecurity experts have rightly been sounding the alarm for years about digital operations being conducted in the name of Iran. This is a turn in the direction of saying that data centers aren’t just targets for gray-zone operations, but targets for full-on kinetic warfare, too.
■ The very international nature of cloud-based services muddies the waters of traditional boundaries a bit. In the past, a combatant state might try to blow up its opponent’s power plants. A successful attack would almost certainly land on the opponent’s territory and have most of its effects specifically on the rival country.
■ An attack on a cloud-based service is different. A data center may well be located away from its country of “domicile”, and if it’s public-facing, then the odds are practically zero that any damage done would be contained.
■ Thus, an attack nominally against the United States might well take place on the soil of a different nation and affect data belonging to a positively United-Nations-esque array of other countries.
■ The rules of conflict have been evolving in a big way for a while now, and the changes are far from over. What remains to be seen is just how far national interests will be defined to reach. Do data centers need anti-missile interceptor systems?