[HN Gopher] The Safecracker of Last Resort (2018) ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-12-31 23:00 UTC)