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Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

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Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened in a 50k people town where my father is from in 1982 with a BIG flood that destroyed the town land registry documents (among a lot of the town). Since he's a lawyer, had first hand experience and I was always curious I asked many things about this a while back. Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people. You can never get to 100% recovery like…

I always wonder how things would be reconciled if something similar happened to a bank. What would be the simplest way to ‘download’ one’s balance whilst proving that the downloaded files were signed by the bank?

I'm good with starting from 0 if the bank is (my mortgage is a lot bigger than my balance)

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#192
post #5

> Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months in Romania. So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable…

This happened in a 50k people town where my father is from in 1982 with a BIG flood that destroyed the town land registry documents (among a lot of the town). Since he's a lawyer, had first hand experience and I was always curious I asked many things about this a while back. Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people. You can never get to 100% recovery like…

And this is why we need title insurance :(

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where "possession is 9/10ths of the law" comes from.

I actually think our discussion came from there! Or at least, there was a previous/later discussion about this exactly related to that.

It's one of those "programmer misconceptions" - we want to make reality fit our neat and tidy list of rules/laws/code; but it's the other way around most of the time.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#194
post #5

> Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months in Romania. So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable…

> the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months

The last thing any government will want to deal with is massive irretrievable data loss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_FrQnQv0Vw

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#195

Romanian friends have told me that this is really due to corruption. Specifically: - government gives IT/data contracts to cronies - cronies don't actually do any real security work to protect the data - things like this happen

Somebody vibed an explainer dashboard with what surfaced online about the incident https://ancpi-atac.mariuscomper.uk/en/

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#196
post #5

> Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months in Romania. So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable…

> the societal implications of being unable to prove land ownership

accidental communism

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#199

Why is deleting the whole database a valid operation? The system should make that impossible.

Why is deleting a row in a table a valid operation? Why is deleting a table in a schema a valid operation? Most likely they had full privileged access to the database.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#200
post #5

> Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months in Romania. So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable…

This happened in a 50k people town where my father is from in 1982 with a BIG flood that destroyed the town land registry documents (among a lot of the town). Since he's a lawyer, had first hand experience and I was always curious I asked many things about this a while back. Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people. You can never get to 100% recovery like…

Not saying that this is the only reason, but it is a big reason why we have a land survey of our property on hand on paper and stored online. If something ever happened to the registry, we could at least establish our claim to our land.
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