Recent content by KernelPanic42

  1. K

    Hackers breached South Africa's top supercomputer and used it to mine crypto

    Trust everybody but trust nobody 😏
  2. K

    Hackers breached South Africa's top supercomputer and used it to mine crypto

    Could be. Well, SHOULD be non technical protocols in place! And even the most robust of these would distill timelines that are fairly quick under normal operating conditions (but they heavily assume best practices and standard protocols are being implemented from the start). To isolate and...
  3. K

    Hackers breached South Africa's top supercomputer and used it to mine crypto

    Not sure how familiar you are with deploying HPC environments, but a basic management server with the necessary base images and configuration files can take one or two days. Re-using old automation scripts and digging up IaC makes it even easier. The hardening is trivial (especially with...
  4. K

    Hackers breached South Africa's top supercomputer and used it to mine crypto

    One may argue any downtime is unacceptable but it depends on the nature of the downtime. If it is an avoidable and trivial exploit then even a millisecond should be considered unacceptable. National systems will have a mandated SLA and they are usually treated as a sunk cost the moment...
  5. K

    South Africa recycling supercomputer hardware

    Great work
  6. K

    Hackers breached South Africa's top supercomputer and used it to mine crypto

    There are options for pre-empting or interrupting workloads. In some cases, a workload can't be adequately predicted so users can risk running out of their allocation time window before completion. In those cases, users would use snapshots ("checkpoints") where data is periodically saved. If a...
  7. K

    Hackers breached South Africa's top supercomputer and used it to mine crypto

    Agreed, yes. Leading HPC centers shut down all their systems when there is a vulnerability and rebuild from trusted sources. Mileage varies on sites but generally best practice (and HPC is no different, potentially the opposite and is more secure) is applied to everything. A local root exploit...
  8. K

    Hackers breached South Africa's top supercomputer and used it to mine crypto

    Please provide proof or stop spreading speculation. You've already shown you don't know what you're talking about with HPC configuration, or even the bandwidth interlinking SA sites.
  9. K

    Hackers breached South Africa's top supercomputer and used it to mine crypto

    You are definitely exposing yourself here. Show some respect because you're providing comments like a noob earlier. Restrain yourself.
  10. K

    Hackers breached South Africa's top supercomputer and used it to mine crypto

    CentOS. Password protected SSH keys and periodic expiry and cycle (painful but necessary)
  11. K

    Hackers breached South Africa's top supercomputer and used it to mine crypto

    No. Please don't believe the OP. https://www.sanren.ac.za/ supports significantly lower bandwidth than what OP said. Also, we DO run firewalls if we are serious about security. There is no excuse for bypassing best practice. An HPC will have diverse landing points and data transfer nodes all...
  12. K

    Hackers breached South Africa's top supercomputer and used it to mine crypto

    One of HUNDREDS compromised? This sounds incredibly sensationalist. An incident of that magnitude would trigger GDPR declarations. Think back to Europe 2020. Your comment about "us" running older Ubuntu is also not accurate. My group runs numerous systems and they're Alma 9, Rocky 9, EL 9. Not...
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