Datacenter Robbed for the Fourth Time in Two Years

mariushm writes "According to the Register, the Chicago-based colocation datacenter C I Host was attacked by armed intruders recently, making it the the fourth time in two years that armed thugs have made off with data. According to a letter C I Host officials sent customers, 'At least two masked intruders entered the suite after cutting into the reinforced walls with a power saw ... During the robbery, C I Host's night manager was repeatedly tazered and struck with a blunt instrument. After violently attacking the manager, the intruders stole equipment belonging to C I Host and its customers.' Aggravating the situation, C I Host representatives took several days to admit the most recent breach, according to several customers who said they lost equipment, all the while reporting the problems as 'router failures'."

The evil thing here

is that it was reported as "Router Failures" instead of the real cause.

And if they have been robbed before - why not increase the security? Four times? - That's some kind of record. Maybe it's time to check if the localization of the whole thing is incorrect and move it to a better location where it's less likely to suffer from this kind of incident?

Advertising for a guard - "bring your own gun"

I couldn't make this stuff up. They're advertising for a security guard [careerbuilder.com],

"We are seeking motivated individuals" ... translation: work cheap.

"Prior security experience preferred." ... translation: not really a requirement, but if we can get it at no extra cost ...

"Some College is also preferred." ... if you managed to drop out of college instead of high school, you're more "presentable" to our insurers, who are now royally pissed at us ...

... and if you scroll down to the bottom of the page:

"Armed Hand-gun license/permit and ability to supply own weapon a Huge Plus! : translation: "we're cheap! You're desperate AND stupid! Let's talk!"

Re:Advertising for a guard - "bring your own gun"

1. The police think it was an inside job
2. The employee wasn't on the premises when the door lock was jimmied open (no, they didn't "cut through a reinforced wall" - they just forced a door open according to the police report and people who went to visit the site the next day to check on their equipment)
3. Fat chance getting a concealed carry permit in Chicago.

   Illinois is one of the few states that has no provision for the concealed carry of firearms by citizens. Open carry is also illegal, except when hunting. When a firearm is being transported, it must be unloaded and enclosed in a case.

   Only cops and military get CCW permits.

CI Host doesn't want to spend the money on secure facilities, instead replacing that with a rent-a-dumb-warm-body. Dumb, because taking this job w/o a permit is just begging to be thrown in jail, and if you have the permit, you can sure as heck do better than CI Host.

Re:Bringing own gun is a good idea

You can't GET a carry permit in Chicago, unless you're a cop or military.

CI Host didn't invest in proper facilities. Contrary to the article summary, the robbery was made by people forcing open the door lock to the office, when nobody was there, and an employee "just happened to show up later in response to the alarm". And the crooks "just happened to have tasers" instead of guns. And the crooks "just happened to steal all the non-existent video surveillance cameras".

And the walls are not "reinforced" - they're plain ordinary office walls. Unless you want to count a new coat of paint as "reinforcement".

Re:The evil thing here

They didn't bust through a wall this time - they forced the lock on the front door of the office "suite", according to a customer who went there the next day to check on his equipment.

The "reinforced walls" exist in the same universe as the "router outage".

There were no employees on duty at the time of the break-in. One employee showed up and got himself tazered, AFTER the door had been forced, in response to an alarm.

This was the 4th break-in in 3 years. That alone is suspicious. Taser? Sure, can't kill a co-worker, right?

Security cameras? There's now a question as to whether they (security cameras owned by CI Host) existed in the first place. The only cameras anyone has seen are a few owned by other businesses in the building ...

All very suspicious.

Re:The evil thing here

I agree, the routers [wikipedia.org] _didn't_ fail, that's how the thieves got in in the first place.

Re:The evil thing here - continuation.

"at least two masked intruders entered the suite after cutting into the reinforced walls with a power saw,"

In what way was that wall reinforced? Dual layer of sheetrock? If it was sufficiently reinforced it would have delayed the intruders long enough for the police to get there (unless the police chose to not respond). If I was insuring that company I would drop the insurance dead by now due to lack of sufficient protective measures. If the measures were approved by the insurance company I would recommend all other clients to change insurance company.

Anyway - maybe it's time to weave in copper mesh into the T-shirt of all datacenter employees to protect against tazers.

And notice from a comment to the article that any so called man trap doesn't exist - and the security seems to have been far too relaxed. Just a fine example of how not to do things. A good datacenter is located where almost nobody knows where it is - preferably underground in a nondescript location in the countryside. A set of optical fibers will take care of all the traffic. And very few persons shall have physical access to the hardware. Think about how the military handles their datacenters.

Re:The evil thing here - continuation.

Stronger walls, and maybe armed security guards. Heck, we have them up here in Canada and we don't have a tenth of the violent crime problems Chicago has.

Re:The evil thing here - continuation.

I actually had a server hosted in that very Chicago facility. (I actually got referred to it by clicking a "$75 a month colocation" advertisement link on slashdot)

The datacenter in question is in a terrible neighborhood, and I can't see anyone bothering a truck there in the dead of night.

There was no man trap, and no security of any sort, just a tech guy who let me in and opened the glass datacenter door for me.

I doubt they have a panic button of any sort either.

You disable the one guy on call and there would be no police coming, period.

Re:The evil thing here - continuation.

if you don't know what a datacenter is, you're probably nowhere near interested in this entire field.

The fact that he is asking at all proves that he is interested in the field.

You must have very poor memory, nuzak, if you can't recall what it was like learning your trade.

When I was in high school, I knew I wanted to work in the computer field, yet I didn't know what a datacenter was. If I had met a pretentious jerk like you, I might not be managing a datacenter, today. Luckily, I met people who answered my questions instead of people like you. I also asked questions on slashdot, and learned quite a lot from this place.

And to answer the original question: A datacenter is a room full of computers with experts monitoring and maintaining them 24/7. It has special air conditioning, wiring, and security. Sometimes people rent servers or space there. Sometimes they contain only the computers of the company that owns the datacenter.

Re:The evil thing here

In that forum, it was posted that the hosting provider had posted a job application for somebody willing or able to carry a gun. They were hiring at minimum wage or just above minimum wage if you had experience with guns.

So, they're looking to hire people that carry guns that are willing to accept a job at minimum wage. That should tell you something right there.

Re:The evil thing here

somebody willing or able to carry a gun.

Illinois is one of the most anti-gun states, and Chicago has even more strict rules on top of that. It's almost as bad as Britain. About the only way you're going to have an armed security guard in Chicago is if he's actually a sworn law enforcement officer or you have *really* tight political connections to those in power.

In a more, uh... "free" state, yes, armed security is a realistic proposition. However such states usually have less violent crime too, so you don't need them as much.

Re:The evil thing here

Illinois is one of the most anti-gun states

Sounds like a great reason to locate a data center in Texas.

-jcr

Re:The evil thing here

It couldn't have happened to a better bunch of scumbags. [slashdot.org] In fact I wouldn't be surprised at all if they robbed the datacenter themselves to destroy evidence or just for insurance fraud.

Pointsec

Hopefully they were smart enough to encrypt the data this time. If not, the company should truly be shut down...

Obligatory...

Don't tase me, bro!

Seriously, though, this sounds like something out of a really bad Hollywood B-Movie.

I didn't know you could do stuff like this in real life.

Re:Obligatory...

No, it sounds like something out of a ridiculously popular A-movie that makes 100s of millions of dollars. You underestimate the american public's willingness to watch total crap.

inside job

smells like an inside job / insurance scam 1st would be an anomaly , 4th time i would be looking very hard at the companies and its staffs finances

Re:inside job

It most likely was an inside job. A little while back, I was working for a company that was installing some VoIP phones for CI Host and the list of employee phone numbers kept changing from visit to visit - "Oh that guy? No, he doesn't work here any more."

A friend of mine that used to work there said that "being in jail was a fairly common excuse for missing work there". The employees seemed to hate working there, to put it mildly.

And the cokehead that owned the company loved to fire employees at a moment's notice, left and right. I highly doubt there's any employee loyalty there.

So in short, you've got highly unhappy employees that get fired at an amazing rate, with some seriously negative employee loyalty and they're surprised when stuff gets stolen?

To be fair, there was a router failure

It turns out the router was unable to route wherever the thieves had taken it.

Not using them anymore

Hmm, I'm not using them anymore. They had regular power failures in Dallas - claiming 'UPS maintenance'. My home DSL setup is more reliable than their data centre.

Re:Not using them anymore

Ditto. I switched off them a year and a half or two ago. I don't remember what the final rub was, I think it was reliability (website or email going up or down seemingly randomly?). I've been on Dreamhost since, and been pretty happy (note: referral link at the bottom of my website).

I agree with the other posters. They lied. They obviously have no security (or they are facing an inside job). Four robberies in two years?

I'd switch off 'em real fast if I heard this news. I like Dreamhost but if I heard this about them I'd probably switch off them fast too. How can I trust a hosting company that can't even secure their own premises?

Still in business?

After the first robbery, I'd seriously consider moving my data. If my data is still there after the second robbery, I feel stupid. If my data is still there after the third robbery, I should lose my job. If my data is still there after the fourth robbery, I need to promoted to executive management.

The entire purpose of off-site storage is disaster recovery, and prevention of major disasters like this. Why are these guys still in business?

Re:Still in business?

Ok, sure it kinda sucks that the place you store your data was robbed 4 times... but what are the odds it could happen a 5th time?

where are the rent a cops at?

In the brake room watching tv / playing games?

Doing the same thing in the big room with all of the tv screens?

Re:where are the rent a cops at?

In the brake room watching tv / playing games?

No, one door to the left in the clutch room.

rj

Honesty.

I'm a Dreamhost customer, and the past couple years they've had a few issues, and some people have taken it as an opportunity to bash the hell out of them. Having used many hosts over the years myself and for customers, I've found them to be on par with, if not a little above many hosts. The biggest difference is DH is HONEST about their issues, on their status blog. When they fuck up, they say so. To me, that's more valuable than a host that makes it self look like it's more stable by lying, such as the parent article's subject. It means when DH tells me something, I can at least trust it's the truth.

location, location, location

Suddenly, buying an old army bunker complex to house your datacenter doesn't seem that excessive.

Fool me once....

shame on you. Fool me four or more times shame on me!

router failure

Well..if they had said "route failure" that would of been accurate since technically the route HAS changed for those servers......

There has to be more to it than this.

That was a truly "professional" operation. It's happened four times. They're specifically targeting this datacenter, and management's reaction is anomalous. If I were a police investigator, I'd start probing. Maybe there's nothing to find, but I'd bet money that there is.

Kind of reminds me of that pizza bomber a couple of years ago.

A few possibilities....

Well, if they actually care enough to try to prevent these attacks, I can see three solutions, any of which should be highly effective:

Deadly force. If you are being robbed at gunpoint on a regular basis, your employees can legitimately say that they fear for their lives, and thus, purchasing of firearms is legally and morally justifiable. Perhaps a couple of guards posted at the entrance with semiautomatic rifles, plus three or four in appropriately concealed locations within the facility (or more if the facility is large enough). Criminals (armed or not) will think twice before attacking.

Electrical interference. Hook a 230 kV transmission line directly to the rebar in the walls. Anyone who tries to cut their way in will likely spontaneously combust, or at the very least, be knocked several meters. Such an attack won't happen twice.

Oxygen deprivation. You probably already have halon fire extinguishers. Assign everyone emergency oxygen masks and a red button remote. In the event of an attack, press the red button and put on your oxygen mask. Assuming you dump enough halon, it will bond with all the free oxygen in the room, incapacitating or killing the intruders in seconds. Assuming they survive, they should still be unconscious when the police arrive to arrest them.

Re:A few possibilities....

Armed guards are probably legal, and using the fire suppression system you could probably get away with if you didn't specifically give orders to use it as a weapon, but the electrical booby trap is almost certainly illegal. If nothing else it almost certainly contravenes local health and safety laws.

Re:A few possibilities....

Deadly force. If you are being robbed at gunpoint on a regular basis, your employees can legitimately say that they fear for their lives, and thus, purchasing of firearms is legally and morally justifiable. Perhaps a couple of guards posted at the entrance with semiautomatic rifles, plus three or four in appropriately concealed locations within the facility (or more if the facility is large enough). Criminals (armed or not) will think twice before attacking.

If the criminals REALLY want to get in it's not a good idea to arm the employees anyway. Specially assigned guards maybe, but the employees of a data center - no... Just imagine if someone has a bad day... Shooting out at the boss, servers and everyone else in sight. Or if the criminals know about it they will shoot first and check later.

Electrical interference. Hook a 230 kV transmission line directly to the rebar in the walls. Anyone who tries to cut their way in will likely spontaneously combust, or at the very least, be knocked several meters. Such an attack won't happen twice.

Assuming that it's concrete walls... But it's a good idea until the maintenance guy comes in to drill a new hole for a cable.

Oxygen deprivation. You probably already have halon fire extinguishers. Assign everyone emergency oxygen masks and a red button remote. In the event of an attack, press the red button and put on your oxygen mask. Assuming you dump enough halon, it will bond with all the free oxygen in the room, incapacitating or killing the intruders in seconds. Assuming they survive, they should still be unconscious when the police arrive to arrest them.

Halon use is outlawed, at least in some countries since it has a bad effect on the ozone layer. Carbon Dioxide is almost as good, and has the same effect. Of course - you may use any non-oxidizing gas like pure nitrogen or helium instead. As long as it lowers the oxygen level in the compartment. A much more evil way is to use carbon monoxide instead of carbon dioxide. In this case the survivability is even lower, but if it's released by accident it will be much more nasty.

But it seems that the datacenter hasn't taken action as it should and moved the servers to a different more covert location. The daily operation can remain at the same location, but since the servers aren't there anymore the criminals will have to leave empty-handed. This requires that the persons running the night-shift doesn't know about the real location of the servers unless they also are relocated.

Cutting through walls?

"after cutting into the reinforced walls with a power saw"

reinforced? wtf were they reinforced with, toilet paper?

sounds like they are conducting business from a fibro and plaster board shack. you'd think they would aleast consider their staff's saftey after the first 3 attacks, i smell asshole managment who aren't willing to spend the cash.

I'm one of the victims....

I've used them for years, and was an avid supporter of CI Host even while they were enduring constant negative publicity.. I was initially a client of their shared hosting, then upgraded to a dedicated hosting package, and never had an issue aside from the typical short downtime every now and then.. nothing crazy.. so a startup I was working with put a colocated server with them earlier this year and in around 6 months we endure an outage for numerous days, numerous BS excuses, then one day "Oh yeah by the way your server was actually stolen, and good luck finding the real thieves!" So now we come to find that this has happened 3-4 times in the past 2 years, the detective (and even a worker there I talked with) told me they believed it was an inside job. Obviously I am cancelling all of my accounts and taking my business elsewhere. I will proudly do my best to spread the word and tell EVERYONE I know to NEVER use CI Host for *ANYTHING*

Kudos to CI Host!

'At least two masked intruders entered the suite after cutting into the reinforced walls with a power saw ... During the robbery, C I Host's night manager was repeatedly tazered and struck with a blunt instrument.

Good on them for hiring the disabled! Although perhaps the night manager position is not one suited to someone so deaf that they can't hear a Sawz-All cutting though the wall...

I'm suprised this is not more common

At first, I thought WTF???? Why would someone break into a data center.

Then, I thought about it, and being that a datacenter has more supposedly valuable stuff that you can pick up and leave with _and_ you have an easy time to sell it, well, I'm only surprised that this is not a daily occurrence.

In the "information age", what is more valuable than information? And the price/pound or volume makes information orders of magnitude more valuable than gold, art or even money itself.

It almost makes sense when you think about it, but there is a rational side of me that says that this makes no sense.

My head is about to explode.

I was one of the victims...

Last November I had ALL my servers stolen there. Now over all the years I have had servers I have backed up data, upgraded servers, clean installed servers, etc., then that fateful day in November after being stonewalled for days I finally went over to the data center only to find ALL my servers stolen. All my data. Yea I had some offsite backups, etc, but .... stolen. I guess they thieves really liked my XServes. They were nice and shiny in a sea of beige and black. Anyway, they gave me some free hosting after that, so, I said ok.. big mistake... about a month ago two of my three servers were stolen. Thankfully I had them a bit spread at the datacenter. Well, can I sue? What can I do now? Same bs, promising me servers and nothing. Last year I lost a lot of clients,,, granted all but two were mostly very small time hosting accounts. This time I now lost a big client even though I got them back up and running asap... get a server, install configure, read the files from the backup server, etc. Anyway it was truly the worst feeling I have had in many a year. It is definitely bs. And what do the Chicago PD do? Well your guess is as good as mine.. maybe they are out ticketing the thieves truck as their meter runs out. Any lawyers out there that can help?

Maybe the thieves got the routers too!

I'll bet a big, multi-port Cicso router might be a better target, pound-for-pound, than a dell server. So the hosting company might have been telling the truth. "The router failed because, ummm, it's no longer connected!" My second thought on this-- it seems like a lot of work to go to (and huge legal risk) for a few dual Xeon servers. I wonder who (or what) was hosting on those boxes. Cutting through the walls and roughing up the security guard will add a lot of years to a conviction. Maybe there's more to the story we're not hearing, and will never know.

Who do they Host

Yes, the servers are expensive peices of kit, but I think frankly, its more likely that there is specific data for a specific site that is being stolen rather than just some hardware, and if thats true, they shoudl be hiding the friggin servers rather than leaving them sitting round "ooo rob me rob me rob me!" You gotta ask, who's the target?

CI Host Chicago

I've actually been in this datacenter. Tried to host some boxes there for a while... and when I finally gave up on their shenanigans, I was not near Chicago, so I just abandoned them there (cheaper than shipping).

First, this datacenter is literally two blocks from what is left of the infamous Cabrini-Green projects. Tough neighborhood, so it's not entirely impossible that it is an outside cracked-up scheme.

There was none of the double-man-trap doors or whatever there. The one staffer was in the back playing a Playstation. The couple of customers in the center exchanged cell numbers, so we could call each other to get let back when we needed to use the toilet.

The Dallas billing people weren't any better. Worst... host... ever.

Your server is down..

down at the pawn shop!

Who is going to buy the gear?

Ok, so they robbed $50,000 of routers and servers.

Where are they going to fence them. The average geek has no need of 16 core Xeons, no matter what game they play. If they were dells, (IF) they are going to have TAG #s and it wouldn't be hard to see Dell doing a trace on em, ie very hot property.

Thirdly, no legit business, at least any I have worked in, would touch (some) state of the art servers at half price, no support, from a questionble source with no history. Same goes for all the cisco kit. Bet they end up abroad.

Cut through RC walls? Sounds fishy to me.

Seriously, cutting through a reinf. concrete wall is not trivial, if it was indeed just that. By code, the minimum thickness of a concrete wall is 6" and most used for loadbearing in anything but the cheapest residential construction are 8". You aren't cutting that with a reciprocating saw (aka Sawzall). Second, reinforced concrete walls are required (in order to be considered "reinforced" by code) to have steel bars equal to 0.0014 x wall area in both directions at a spacing no greater than 18". That typically works out to a 1/2" steel bar at 12" on center or a 5/8" steel bar at 16" o 18" on center both horizontally and vertically.

Now, this is a non-technical publication, so "reinforced" may mean anything - like a 1/2" bar at the top and bottom, and around jambs. Also, this is Chicago, known far and wide for severe corruption in the building inspection process.

Still, anything close to a RC wall is going to require a diamond blade and a gas powered saw for any kind of efficiency at all, and the cut rate is going to be measured in single-digit (or fractional) inches per minute. Most also require a water source for cooling. You'd have to be utterly incompetent not to catch these guys before they got in.

couldn't of happened to a nicer company ;)

As a company that host spammers, and threatens lawsuits (cartoonies) against anti spammers, I can only hope the crooks stole the spam servers as well.

http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=cihost.com [spamhaus.org]

You would think...

After the second time they would have someone sitting in there all
the time with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S&W_Model_500 [wikipedia.org]

Awwww yeah...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxLmiYiwvus [youtube.com]

Take my server now bro!! I dare ya!

C I Host hasn't changed, it seems

I left them (moving to tera-byte [tera-byte.com]) over 5 years ago. At the time, C I Host had all sorts of DNS problems, yet they continued to deny there was any problem.

Here is a copy of the police reports

I found these links to the report from a post on theregister.co.uk [theregister.co.uk]

Report 1 Page 1 [imageshack.us]
Report 1 Page 2 [imageshack.us]
Report 2 Page 1 [imageshack.us]
Report 2 Page 2 [imageshack.us]
Report 3 Page 1 [imageshack.us]
Report 3 Page 2 [imageshack.us]

The guy says that $50,000 worth of stuff was stolen...not only servers, but misc crap like routers, and battery chargers for Black Berry units.

I'd say either look for a new web host startup in the Chicago area in the next year, or a lot of stuff going cheap on Ebay.

The saddest part about this is that the crims clubbed and zapped some innocent guy that would have offered zero resistance. For this, I hope they thieves go to jail for a long time.

4th time?

And they didn't increase security? thats pretty irresponsible. At least give the poor guard a gun and a partner. How about a panic button ?

Maybe they

replaced the servers with an IBM BladeCenter [youtube.com].

This does not surprise me.

The company I work for used to be a client of theirs, and like many others here, eventually got fed up with their constant downtime. When we canceled our service and they shipped the servers back, all four rackmount servers had the rack-screw-tabs bent because they shipped them with no padding whatsoever. They were just rattling around inside the cardboard boxes during shipment.

A former employee of CI Host contacted us after we quit their service and told us this little gem:

That time early this year when their entire Chicago datacenter was down for two days? They forgot to pay their power bill.

CI Host is uber crap

Basically, don't use this shitty company.

The fact that someone lost their stuff is tough luck.

Then again, CI Host could just as well have terminated their account for _NO REASON_ and taken their money instead. That's also theft - and something CI Host has been known to do (yup, it happend to me, I'm a very annoyed EX-customer of this shitty company).

Morale: Don't use CI Host. They either steal your money or let your equipment be stolen.

Did I mention they never returned any emails I sent them? Neither did they return any phone calls.

Crap company. Use another hosting company... if you're using CI Host I recommend that you switch NOW, before it's too late.

More info pending..

The night manager was unavailable for comment as he kept stuttering and jerking.

Frankie & The Boss: Planning a snatch and gra

Okay Frankie. Youse got da info we need to break inta da place, right?

Yeah boss! Lookie here, on da webpage!

Name: CDC-03
Location: 900 North Franklin, 3rd Floor, Chicago, IL 60610
NPA/NXX: 312/640

Not bad, Frankie...not bad! Uh-oh...what's dis? Dis could hold us up...

No signage, nondescript building

No problemo, boss! See? They gave us a picture! [cihost.com]

*snort* An dey call us teeves dumb...

last laugh

Revenge is in sight: the crooks stole Vista machines.

Reminds me of a quote

"There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again." --President "ugh" George W Bush, Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

Where is CIHost's reply?

This is the point where the company needs to step up and be clear in everything. Otherwise they should just shutdown the data center in Chicago.

colo "security" on the cheap

Just by looking at their own website, it is clear that they have no clue regarding even half-assed security: Tempered glass doors, basic commercial drywall, padlocks, sesamee locks, bolt-together, clamp-together industrial cages that can be cut through or torn apart in mere seconds, the absence of their alleged man-traps, no visible cameras, et cetera, ad nasueum. No wonder they're so popular with criminals. This is an example, soon to be classic textbook, of how not to do security. Pocket the money you save on security and charge beaucoup bux for it--competitive rates, you know--and be prepared to spend it on legal fees or escape to Brasil.

C I Host? What does that mean?

• Completely Incompetent Host.
• Criminals Inside Host

Cheesy datacenter

OK, I'm no datacenter expert, but C I Host has a photo tour of their datacenter at http://www.cihost.com/about/virtual-tour/cdc03.php [cihost.com] . Looks pretty cheesy security-wise to me. And is it normal to have GLASS man-traps?

Phew... Nothing was stolen!

... armed thugs have made off with data.

As every kid on Slashdot knows, data can not be stolen — when a copy is made, the originals and the backups remain in place.

Who cares for some hardware — the rich owners can buy new, but the poor robbers must've had a difficult childhood.

CI Host's Unethical Practices - Other Options

Our firm originally maintained servers at CI Host. Shortly after they opened their Chicago Data Center, we visited their facility and found the data center empty other than just a few standalone servers. The data center was hot, well over 80 degrees. There was one person manning the facility. As for security, there wasn't any. I won't mention the unethical practices of a CI Host employee trying to solicit directly to our customers. We found this practice and their data center unacceptable. We now operate and maintain our own data center with enhanced security, climate control, complete power backup system, and operating speeds of OC-48/OC-192. If anyone is interested in top quality hosting, dedicated or shared, please call. Visit our website at http://www.pagedesk.com./ [www.pagedesk.com]

Well if you look at their virtual tour

http://www.cihost.com/about/virtual-tour/cdc03.php [cihost.com] It looks like their Chicago facility has already been robbed.

oblig

Why don't they just use a firewall? I mean, literally.

Surprise surprise

The worst experience I've ever had in all my years of existence (possibly worse than that time when a train ran me over leaving me stranded for hours until a helicopter ambulance finally came only for it to crash and burn over the mountains shortly after takeoff where I survived for two months by eating slugs and other niceties while slipping away from the jaws of death on half a dozen occasions that involved running away from leopards, moose and, once, a lion), was dealing with C I HOST support and staff about 5 or so years ago.

Any money that I made back then all went to the good folks at C I HOST who were more than happy to cleverly suck it from me. So it came as no surprise to learn that following a recent robbery of one of their datacenters, they did what they do best: they reached into their bag of tricks and came up with the best way to tell their customers about the unfortunate situation: blatantly lying to them and saying it was caused by a router failure. It's ironic that the "Register" article is titled "Masked thieves storm into Chicago colocation (again!)"

Were it not the case that people's data got stolen and that they'll probably not be reimbursed by C I HOST, again no surprise, I'd have said that karma's a pretty cool guy. How that company has survived for so long given the rotten way it deals with customers is a mystery.

Sure glad CIHost is not our provider any longer...

A few years back CIHost support oops'ed one too many times... we switched providers. Sure glad we did! We were able to cut our hosting monthly expense by a factor of 12, and got so much more than we had with CIHost.

The place is in StreetView

You can look at the building (900 North Franklin, Chicago, IL 60610) in Google Street View. Older brick building with casement windows. Main entrance has wooden doors with big glass panels. No sign of external cameras. Rear of building has an external fire escape. Extensive graffiti on upper story doors leading to fire escape. Upper story windows easily reachable from fire escape.

I worked there

there's no doubt in my mind it was an inside job. that place is run like a sweat shop. the owners sue anybody who slanders or even attempt to slander them. they're so litigious, it makes Johnny Cochran look like a helpless baby (albeit a dead one).

I worked there because after the tech bubble popped. I helped get a host of my friends to work there too. It was hell on earth. They're just getting what they deserve.

--

Re:This sounds bogus

So it was a router failure then.

They'll say anything as long as it isn't the truth.

Re:And the police were where?

To be fair, I could probably rob 10 businesses in this manner before the cops showed. they are never around when you need them.

Re:And the police were where?

All the more reason for armed guards or even armed employees

Good luck there - this is *Chicago*, remember. They, like many other large cities, much prefer to disarm the populace and then pretend that there's no more gun crime as a result.

Re:Nice

Translated:

As an ex-employee of the webhost in question, I am really getting a kick out of these replies...

Sorry, I spend too much time on another discussion site. :)

Re:Seen their ad?

As well as cheap. I'd feel better running a server from home.

Re:Seen their ad?

It's still on their homepage. Three days since expire. Maybe it's on a server behind a reinforced wall and the tech misplaced his powersaw.

Re:Don't put it on a pedestal

reinforced with what though? a few years worth of playboy calendars?

Re:Not really the company's fault

Not their fault? This is four times. It shoudn't have even been able to happen once, but four times is just insane.

Yeah, it's a corporate data center. The data center my company's offsite servers are at is surrounded by concrete anti-ram poles, has 24-7 armed guards, forced entry alarms on all of the cages that notifies the owner of the cage, foot-thick actually reinforced concrete walls, alarms that call the police directly, and a security procedure with a call after any kind of suspicious behavior.

I'd consider that, along with a bunch of other stuff (biometric + keycard + pin + guard has to identify you by your ID and buzz you in to airlock-style doors) pretty good physical security. The thing is, that's a baseline for a colo data center. It's only about $500 a month (before bandwidth) for a full rack there, so it's not like this is some kind of super-expensive facility.

Although you'd be a fool to not check it out, physical security being part of the deal is assumed when you're talking about colocation.

Re:If Jim DiGriz were a hacker...

He'd have done it with style. This would be beneath him -- in fact he'd probably be insulted. He'd probably clean the place out and then blow up the building as a lesson to the owners.

Oh, he'd have said something witty, too.

His wife would have just killed everyone in the middle of the day.

Re:Armed robbers? Impossible!

They would just bring guns instead of a taser and shoot the guard. Duh!

Re:Nice

There are way too many anonymous cowards "speaking up." I believe you're a competitor who's lying to exploit the situation. Either take off the mask or stop speaking, please.