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UK spy agencies outsource top-secret storage to Amazon

paulfromcamden

paulfromcamden

Baffled
This seems, er, surprising. What could possibly go wrong?

Amazon strikes deal with UK spy agencies to host top-secret material

The UK’s three spy agencies have contracted AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing arm, to host classified material in a deal aimed at boosting the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence for espionage. The procurement of a high-security cloud system has been championed by GCHQ, the UK’s signals intelligence body, and will be used by sister services MI5 and MI6, as well as other government departments such as the Ministry of Defence during joint operations.

GCHQ told the Financial Times it would not discuss its business relationships with technology suppliers. AWS declined to comment.

https://www.ft.com/content/74782def-1046-4ea5-b796-0802cfb90260
 
Sounds like the plot of a new James Bond film. Nefarious international organisation dupes national security services into surrendering priceless data. Can 007 stop the dastardly plan before it's too late?
 
Anyone read The Warehouse?

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https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1787631249/?tag=pinkfishmedia-21
 
This site contains affiliate links for which pink fish media may be compensated.
Govt is a bunch of amoral nasties. Putin kills who he wants on UK streets. Is anything in the UK top secret ? I'm more concerned about whether top secret has a hyphen or not.
 
I have been in commercial data centres with special caged off high security areas within them , holding who knows what? Suspect this has been going for years
 
At least Amazon has a vested interest in propping the ‘West’ up. Sad fact is commerce can buy the best brains so GCHQ is probably making the best of a bad job.
 
MUTTY1 said:
At least Amazon has a vested interest in propping the ‘West’ up. Sad fact is commerce can buy the best brains so GCHQ is probably making the best of a bad job.
Click to expand...

Me too - many an hour lying on the floor of noisy data centres as there were no portable laptop stands or seats!

Been locked in too haha.
 
I’ve been into a couple of Azure datacenters (sic) and It was easier getting a visitor pass to Porton Down. IMHO the easiest way into any datacenter is through an ethernet cable and I guess AWS are better at spotting that than most.
 
There are very strict requirements for classified data storage, as long as they are met, then I fail to see the problem.

If it were my data, I'd advocate to use professionals like AWS rather than maintain that capability internally.
 
johnhunt said:
I have been in commercial data centres with special caged off high security areas within them , holding who knows what? Suspect this has been going for years
Click to expand...

And I have been in those cages :)

AWS is a pretty secure, sure it will take a massive error or zero day to break it.

S
 
Alexa, show me all assets within 200 kilometers of Brussels. Alexa, launch project Rejoin.
 
From last year. Perhaps this sort of thing also regularly happens to state-owned infrastructure and it's just not reported. Who knows.

A sophisticated hacker group pwned Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers, set up a rootkit that let them remotely control servers, then merrily funnelled sensitive corporate data home to its command and control (C2) servers from a range of compromised Windows and Linux machines inside an AWS data centre.

That’s according to a report from the UK’s Sophos published late last week, which has raised eyebrows and questions in the security industry. The attackers neatly sidestepped AWS security groups (SGs); which, when correctly configured, act as a security perimeter for associated Amazon EC2 instances.

Security experts agreed that the attacker, likely a nation state actor, could have used the bespoke rootkit to funnel data off most servers, whether in the cloud or on-premises.

https://techmonitor.ai/technology/cloud/aws-servers-hacked-rootkit-in-the-cloud
 
Wouldn’t the data be encrypted before being sent to the cloud? More worrying is if the data is doubly encrypted by ransomware.
 
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