How a Real Fire Can Burn Data in the Cloud

Reports that Russian authorities have blamed problems accessing Google and YouTube on a fire at a data centre in Strasbourg highlight the growing cyber threat in the cloud, whether caused by malicious actors or not.

It has been reported by BBC news that the data centre belongs to French provider OVH, which provides cloud services for 1.6 million customers across 140 countries in Europe, North America and Asia. According to Malwarebytes, OVH is the largest hosting provider in Europe and the third largest in the world, with 2019 revenue of €600mn. The company is also rumoured to have started the IPO process.

OVH’s chief executive Octave Klaba tweeted that the fire destroyed one of the data centres and a part of a second, asking customers to activate their disaster recovery plans. The French government, cryptocurrency exchange Deribit and the Pompidou Centre in Paris were affected.

According to Costin Raiu, director of the Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) at Kaspersky Lab, there are 140 OVH servers used by government hackers and sophisticated criminal groups that he and his colleagues track. Of those, 36 percent are now down, he said in a post on Twitter.

 “OVH is a pretty important hosting company on the internet”, said Mike Prettejohn, director of Netcraft, a UK based network security company speaking to Reuters. He added that the affected servers hosted 3.6 million websites including niche Government platforms in France, United Kingdom and Ivory Coast. In all, Mr Prettejohn estimated around 2 percent of sites using a FR domain would be affected by the fire.

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