[HN Gopher] The Safecracker of Last Resort (2018)
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       The Safecracker of Last Resort (2018)
        
       Author : wallflower
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2020-12-31 19:48 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
        
       | mysterypie wrote:
       | When the World Trade Center collapsed during 9/11, those
       | buildings must have had hundreds or thousands of safes. Many
       | high-quality safes must have survived the fire and impact. Did
       | anyone try to recover them or were they hauled off in the cleanup
       | (100,000 trucks full of debris)?
        
         | showerst wrote:
         | Are there really safes in existence that would survive the fire
         | that melted the building's steel infrastructure and the
         | building collapse?
        
           | jibcage wrote:
           | Presumably the entire building and its contents did not melt.
           | There were probably many kicking around in the rubble.
        
         | stretchcat wrote:
         | Many if not most of those safes would have been in fires for
         | days if not weeks. No safe could protect papers from charring
         | in circumstances like that.
        
         | quantgenius wrote:
         | Multiple brokerages, most famously Merrill Lynch, had both,
         | primary datacenters and safes containing daily backup tapes in
         | the WTC. There were unknown dependencies and backup systems
         | that had been presumed to be independent did not work. Some
         | secondary datacenters were in adjacent buildings also damaged
         | by the attack. It had been assumed, given the extra protections
         | put in place after the prior bombing, that the WTC was as safe
         | as it gets so some firms had primary and secondary datacenters
         | in different towers or different floors of the WTC. Multiple
         | safes were plucked out and databases of customer positions were
         | restored during the week the stock markets were closed. Getting
         | these safes and the tapes out was given priority despite
         | everything else going on because if the databases had not been
         | brought back on line, there would have been absolute chaos in
         | the markets.
         | 
         | Immediately after the attack, exchanges moved their datacenter
         | operations to sites in NJ about 80 miles apart and both
         | exchanges and large brokerages setup backup datacenters in
         | Delaware, far enough away to be unaffected by a thermonuclear
         | blast hitting New York.
         | 
         | I believe, prior to 2001 only JP Morgan (pre-Chase acquisition
         | JP Morgan) had backup datacenters in Delaware but there may
         | have been one or two others.
        
         | m463 wrote:
         | I thought there was literally tons of gold stored in the WTC.
         | Now I'm going to have to go look up the stories.
        
       | bsder wrote:
       | This is cool.
       | 
       | But the reality is that if you _NEED_ what is in a safe--you
       | drill it.
       | 
       | A safe isn't some magical device that somehow stops all access.
       | The goal of a safe is to slow down an attack sufficiently that
       | _humans_ will notice that the safe is being attacked and do
       | something about it.
        
         | ceejayoz wrote:
         | Unless there's an anti-tamper incendiary device or something, I
         | suppose.
         | 
         | The article does mention he does a lot of drilling.
        
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       (page generated 2020-12-31 23:00 UTC)