Sophos Cloud Optix
There’s a storm brewing in New Zealand, it seems, after news that the supercomputer at NIWA, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, was hacked.
Sadly, none of the stories we’ve seen so far have given any suggestion of what “hacked” is supposed to mean in this context.
But several news outlets have pointed out that the computer, known as FitzRoy, weighs in at 18 tonnes, needs a specially-reinforced floor, and is as powerful as 7000 laptops.
At least one report describes it as the most powerful supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere, though NIWA’s own site modestly claims simply that it is “one of the most powerful.”
Apparently, the computer was disconnected from the internet as stories circulated that a certain foreign power was to blame.
Google’s search engine, for instance, turns up the following URL from New Zealand’s 3News:
That article takes you in turn to:
You’d have to guess that the word “probably” was added later, which may be just as well considering that 3News’s followup story is:
So it seems that FitzRoy was definitely, probably, hacked by China, unless it wasn’t actually hacked at all.
Perhaps there really was an intrusion, but the infiltrator didn’t stick around long?
That would hardly be surprising.
Imagine that you were a cybercrook, on the lookout for some insecure virtual machines for a bit of free malware hosting, or for some unprotected Twitter accounts for link spamming.
Instead, you arrived unexpectedly on an 18,000kg computing behemoth running weird and wonderful mathematical models.
You’d turn tail and flee, too, I reckon.
Anyway, reports are that FitzRoy is back online, so Kiwi weather forecasts will keep in shape.
(No “cloud” wordplay, please.)
Was it a Gibson?
The computer is primarily used for complex scientific modelling – it can do 65 trillion processes a second. It doesn’t hold any sensitive information, but could be used as a digital weapon if infiltrated. This issue will raise the issue of cyber attacks in general with US president Barack Obama.
Yes, I read that stuff about it being a “digital weapon.” But what on *earth* does that mean?
My Mac is much more of a digital weapon – it’s a top end laptop, probably about 1/3000th the power of this 18-tonne giant, yet it fits in my rucksack, doesn’t need mains electricity or airconditioning, and can be deployed anywhere at a moment’s notice.
You won’t cut *my* Mac off the internet by sticking a blanking plate over its RJ45 socket (as some stories are claiming happened to FitzRoy)…it doesn’t have an RJ45 socket.
Calling FitzRoy “a digital weapon” is about as useful as saying “it’s a type of computing device.”
Wintermute!
Yes indeed the term ‘hacked’ needs clarification in this case and so the depth and width of hacking. I don’t think so there was that traditional sort of hacking went on, you would agree with me but first wait for related stories to surface on the web.
Problem is that related stories *are* surfacing on the web, and they’re all contradictory.
That’s what this article is really about: the dangerous propensity of computer security stories to get a life of their own that may do little more than distract us from “mundane” stuff, like data breaches that expose more than 100,000,000 users’ worth of PII, or grab onto more than 40,000,000 credit card numbers.
“So it seems that FitzRoy was definitely, probably, hacked by China, unless it wasn’t actually hacked at all.”
The phrase “hacked by China” implies (to me, anyway) something different from “the hack came from China”. The headline (including the later hedged “probably” version) implies only that China was the geographic origin of the hack. Indeed, Mr. Key’s statement allows acknowledges that the source of the hack isn’t necessarily “a Chinese entity”.
But the very first line in the 3news article says “China is the prime suspect”, and goes on to mention Chinese (state) espionage, implying (or at least making it easy to infer) that “Political Reporter” Brook Sabin suspects that the hacking was “official” and not the work of some private individual who happened to be located in China.
Perhaps I’m naive about such things, but if China (I mean the state, not some individual Chinese person) were doing the hacking, it seems to me that they would know their target, and wouldn’t turn tail and flee when they got in.
Crooks could have turned it into the largest bitcoin generator… They just would have had to replace the atmospheric models with random generators and they could have gone unnoticed for quite some time 😀
It was probably hacked by climate change deniers, who have everything to gain by altering data.