alt Hacker News> 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 to prove land ownership but it seems that may be avoided.
Replies
Remember the xerox-scandal years back, that invalidated officially scanned documents. You already life in a world where "scanned before" means you can legally challenge the validity of a document.
About 15% of the UK's land parcels are not in any land registry database, because recording there only became compulsory in 1990, so if an event like a sale/morgtage didn't happen to a property since then, it might not be registered. Regardless of the land registry, the ownership can still easily be proven.
I'd bet money the offline copy is far from up-to-date, given the state of the network. It still has potential to be mayhem
I'm skeptical that they not missing at least a week's or so worth of land title registry transactions, if the only thing they have left is offline, because offline backups are not made after every single transaction.
If the hacker was targeting the erasure of a particular recent transaction, they may well have succeeded. And by deleting numerous others, they have plausible deniability in the subsequent dispute over the property. If you just wipe a record that is related to you, and the manipulation is discovered (which it will be, one way or another), you are part of a narrow circle of suspects.
When I worked at a stressful place I was worried not only of our version control getting damaged but also someone deciding they had had enough and doing damage on their way out.
I had a copy of our code on media in my desk labeled “promotion” and updated it every month. In retrospect someone going through my desk would have assumed blackmail material and been disappointed to find only code.
I wonder why the say "appears to have had," is that an assumption or was it stated somewhere? Without an offline backup, it would indeed be a very serious problem, more than it already is.
> 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.
now they get to do a greenfield implementation too!
/joking, i'm sure this is not a happy time for whoever is trying to rebuild everything
Has not digital data always been a secondary source of information, instead of a primary source of information? Paper records cannot be thrown away. And new records are probably recorded digital only but a copy is sent to the parties in the transaction
> I was worried about the societal implications of being unable to prove land ownership but it seems that may be avoided.
You know, it's not like people would come and steal your land overnight because you can't provide proof of ownership.
In the US, real estate purchases come with "title insurance", because there is no official, guaranteed, land registry database.
A land title is written on paper or cardboard, with signatures and stamps on it.
The digital copy is just that; a digital copy.
The hacker would have to destroy the database and all backups, and also burn down the building holding the registry.
Romania is not very digitalized, and it still has a lot of paper bureaucracy.
Even if the digital records were completely lost, they still have the paper ones.
> being unable to prove land ownership
People know who owns what, there are also paper contracts of ownership which are more authoritative than the digital records.
> the societal implications of being unable to prove land ownership
accidental communism
The sad part is, the whole world worked perfectly fine without anything online, ever, prior to 20 years ago. Even 10 years ago for slow-moving change.
It's literally not a requirement to have it all online. And the cost of developers, plus coding + security updates + platform costs, really just means you replace a few assistants which would process requests by hand, with all that.
Except? It's a lot harder to hack a person to delete all the files in the office, from 10k km away, than via a computer.
So many things simply don't need to be online. So many things simply are better archived by other means. So many things are safer, more secure, and the backup processes (microfiche, etc) are well understood and just work.
One more reason to to define the whole infrastructure in code and have offline backups. Recovering could be measured in hours.
[flagged]
[dead]
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 that, but everyone knows who their neighbor is, at least in a town that is small like this.
So they rebuilt it first from first hand proof, then by testimonies, with a period of counter claims available IIRC. For sure there were some false claims, but given the magnitude of the disaster, this is the best solution within that context.