The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines
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The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines
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Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines
#2"At the time of writing the site uses 21 virtual machines (VMs) hosted at different providers. [...] All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers."
Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines
#3"At the time of writing the site uses 21 virtual machines (VMs) hosted at different providers. [...] All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers."
They may "have no clue" but it seems like that's only because they don't care and haven't looked. I don't see anything in the article that would prevent the providers from figuring this out unless I'm missing something.
Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines
#4"At the time of writing the site uses 21 virtual machines (VMs) hosted at different providers. [...] All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers."
They may "have no clue" but it seems like that's only because they don't care and haven't looked. I don't see anything in the article that would prevent the providers from figuring this out unless I'm missing something.
If someone is paying the bill, do they really care?
Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines
#5"At the time of writing the site uses 21 virtual machines (VMs) hosted at different providers. [...] All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers."
They may "have no clue" but it seems like that's only because they don't care and haven't looked. I don't see anything in the article that would prevent the providers from figuring this out unless I'm missing something.
I think only the load balancer would be vulnerable to discovery. Everything behind the load balancer could be a secure connection to a completely different datacenter if needed.
Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
They may "have no clue" but it seems like that's only because they don't care and haven't looked. I don't see anything in the article that would prevent the providers from figuring this out unless I'm missing something.
If someone is paying the bill, do they really care?
The first time TPB was raided they took a bunch of unrelated servers too. Not sure how discriminating the police will be next time, regardless of VMs.
Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines
#7If the load balancer is the weak point that would be first to be discovered, then I imagine they must have some mechanism to stop it leaving evidence that leads to the other machines if it were to get raided (it isn't on their hardware, so they can't prevent the files being backed up).
Is there a way the codebase could be entirely encrypted and not even accessible to the cloud provider (with some 'boot password' needed each time the server starts up)?
Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines
#8"At the time of writing the site uses 21 virtual machines (VMs) hosted at different providers. [...] All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers."
They may "have no clue" but it seems like that's only because they don't care and haven't looked. I don't see anything in the article that would prevent the providers from figuring this out unless I'm missing something.
Apart from the external-facing proxy (which is the most exposed link in this setup), these VMs don't need any sort of public presence. Unless the provider inspects processes running on all their customers machines, all they can see is a VM with opaque VPN connections to a few external ips.
Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines
#9" This saved costs, guaranteed better uptime, and made the site more portable and thus harder to take down "
Probably not true for " This saved costs ". From what i've seen, virtual machines usually cost more than twice the price of renting the equivalent "real" machine monthly.
They could have used dedicated servers; there are more dedicated server providers than VM providers, thus achieving the same goal, less expensively.
Probably not true for " better uptime " either; VMs are still hosted on real hardware, which fails, too. (Although distributing the work on more independent machines can improve uptime.)
Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines
#10" This saved costs, guaranteed better uptime, and made the site more portable and thus harder to take down " Probably not true for " This saved costs ". From what i've seen, virtual machines usually cost more than twice the price of renting the equivalent "real" machine monthly. They could have used dedicated servers; there are more dedicated server providers than VM providers, thus achieving the same goal, less expe…
They are more expensive, but they are usually easy and immediate to acquire. Which makes provisioning much more efficient in case of fluctuating traffic. And overall sysadmins will have less tendency to over-provision, meaning getting more and beefier machines than it's needed "to be safe".