> 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.
Incompetent bureaucrats strike again.
News at 11.
An update from the land registry (the truthfulness of this remains to be seen depending on how fast this comes back online):
ANCPI announced that it had begun migrating its applications to Romania’s Government Cloud. The operation is being coordinated by the Special Telecommunications Service (STS) and is expected to be completed on Wednesday, July 22.
After the migration, authorized institutions will inspect the applications and data and prepare a report on the condition of the systems and any additional measures required. Based on that report, ANCPI will announce an estimated date for restoring its applications. Services will be brought back online gradually, according to operational priorities.
ANCPI says it is rebuilding its database from backup copies stored in several locations. The agency rejected reports suggesting that it did not have sufficient backups, explaining that the use of multiple storage locations provides redundancy and allows data to be restored after cybersecurity incidents.
According to ANCPI, affected systems must remain isolated until every identified vulnerability has been addressed. Although shutting down the services has caused temporary inconvenience, the agency says the measure was necessary to protect the data and ensure that operations restart safely and reliably.
The restoration of the IT infrastructure is described as a complex process being conducted in cooperation with the relevant authorities. ANCPI has also confirmed that a criminal investigation is underway, but no official conclusions can yet be released.
The agency warned that claims circulating publicly about the alleged consequences of the attack are not based on official information and do not reflect the current state of the investigation.
My ex was late from work once a week because the company did commercial real estate logistics (sort of similar domain here) and she had the job of going to the secure data center and grabbing a backup disk out of the cage and transferring it to a safety deposit box.
The dumb thing was the bank was two blocks from the data center and less than eight (six?) from the office so catastrophic events might have hit both or all three. The owner kept a second copy at his house, and that was the only geographically separated copy.
>it had begun migrating its applications to Romania’s Government Cloud
This proclamation, coming from a governmental organization, makes me afraid they are doomed. Effectively they are saying they are fixing the mistake by repeating it.
What they should do is admit fault. Freeze the system. Get independent expert help.
Best wishes, recent Romanian land buyers and sellers
Edit: thank you @cbg0 for giving us this update
They are getting expert help. I expect that the agency maintained their own local deployment on infra administered by its own employees. Now they are migrating to the central 'government(-maintained) cloud'.
At the same time they are working with authorities.
Not everything needs an external consultant.
Poor password practice and policy, and likely a lack of 2FA / physical token security, seem to have contributed to this breach.
Posts and screenshots apparently by the alleged attacker show "P@ssw0rd" and other well-known / readily-guessable passwords from the hacked systems:
<https://spear.cx/Thread-Selling-RO-Thy-arss-shall-be-spanked...>
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iZc93XfViOk7izusgIG1ni7Kmsx...>
Originally noted, without references, by ExoticPearTree here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48978836>.
NB: If you're going to point out stupidity verging on cliched tropes, do so with sufficient evidence that it doesn't read as a tired and unsubstantiated canard. The fact that this does happen (and apparently did) doesn't mean it's necessarily the case in any specific instance.
For me the first 2FA devices I’d had were for work but for my friends it was for a world of Warcraft. And it was years until my bank offered 2FA. I still think about that every time there is a breach.
Blizzard gave hardware tokens out to the entire convention one year. Smart phones became a variable not long after and then they didn’t make them mandatory but game guilds almost universally did. Especially for officers.
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
As a Romanian I can tell you that most of the corruption happens through "dedicated contracts", or outright syphoning.
In this case I expect an underpaid employee, and at most an incompetent nephew of someone. They had no reason to have an .authorized_keys file in the webroot of the website, and yet they did.
If you want to know what "dedicated contracts" look like in practice they are overly specific requirements than can only match a single business. The best example that comes to mind was when one county needed to buy busses (or vans) and the maximum length admitted was bellow the most common options, but as luck would have it a nephew of a cousing of someone with decision power (or something like that) just so happened to be the one importing cars that precisely matched the specs.
Same thing is rampant in other Eastern European countries as well. Tips on how to address this for those of us that are publicly minded?
It's no different anywhere. Security isn't valued since it's just an email and a .01% or less income fine.
The amount of times my SSN and correlated info has been leaked and I've been offered a free year or credit monitoring is depressing.
Problem really is that things like SSN or ID numbers should have never been treated as more as just one possible semi-public unique identifier. Never anything to be used in identifying a person for a contract.
This would implicate close to 100% of American firms and most of the adult population?
If they are clearly misusing a system (SSN) never designed nor intended that way. And continue to do so even after being shown the facts.
There is a somewhat valid argument to be made that aggressively trying to hack these insecure government portals could lead to a real reprioritization towards competence.
I'd say form an IT firm and bid on government contracts and do honest work, but we all know how that goes in reality. Honest workers don't get the contracts. You can still try, though.
I'm sure it's obvious to anyone living in a corrupt/oppressive regime, but in case it's not obvious to everyone.
Corruption and oppression are signaling and coordination problems. The illegitimate sovereign is exploiting informational assymmetry: they know your neighbors are just as angry as you, they know it because all the walls have ears.
They need to prevent you and your neighbors all knowing it at the same time. Your best play is to find some signal, something difficult to censure, hard for the goons to pick out in a crowd but legible to your neighbors. If you all knew that the first guy to shove back when the cop shoves you is going to be followed by a swarm of guys? Very easy to find the first guy in that case.
This is why shit like extremely high gas prices scares the shit out of illegitimate sovereigns: they're the ones posting pure data about why everyone should be that angry right now.
Vote and join a party
Use EU funds to build it then tip the EPPO when they defraud the funds?
Somebody vibed an explainer dashboard with what surfaced online about the incident https://ancpi-atac.mariuscomper.uk/en/
This is the same in the UK too. Governments everywhere are the same. It's just humans motivated by greed and easily corruptible.
They said this in the article:
> Sources told Risky Business that the hacker entered using valid credentials
"It's corruption and cronies" is a generic cop-out answer that doesn't explain anything.
Like whenever someone gets caught in a compromising situation they say they "were hacked", as if saying that means anything.
Its a bit more nuanced than that. The company responsible for ensuring the cybersecurity of the system told the press that "they secured what the client told them to secure and it was not their job to tell the client what needs to be secured".
And I think it's a label that's used freely on Hacker News against Eastern Europeans
It is not corruption. Or not just corruption.
A close relative, government employee, was in charge of building a new application. They have nobody in that entire organization of several thousands people that know how to write specifications for an IT application, nobody that knows how to design, test and deploy it. This is because some government employees have decent salaries, but in IT the private sector is paying a lot more, so almost anyone remotely competent is going to the private sector. So in this case an organization of non-IT people had to deal with the contract and all the associated problems - there is no need to guess, it did not go well. That kind of project could have been done properly with ~ 10% of the budget in the same timeline.
I have a friend that worked as a developer in such a government IT project. The project cost was ~ 5-10 times what was worth, a chain of sub-contractors did the work, less than ten competent people doing the project, charged by the bid winner for over 100 people and actual staff was around 70 at most, for a short period of time.
Both projects above are in Romania. Lack of competent people in the projects, especially in decision roles, was the main problem.
It's always amusing how this is always attributed to the corruption.
It's even more funny on Reddit when you can see the person who is blaming cronies in his Romania but has posts of him doing some blue-collar work in the Midwest.
Security firm KELA... has doxxed the hacker as Zakaria Mahdjoub, an individual from Oran, Algeria.
Algeria has a extradition treaty with Romania:
https://periodicos.processus.com.br/index.php/egjf/article/v...
The backups got wiped together with the systems, so they were reachable from same network. A backup the attacker can reach is not a backup. Good they had an offline copy, but a system this important should have that as regular schedule, not depend on luck.
That was my thought exactly on reading that line: that is not a backup. (Ok, the word isn't strictly defined, but you know what I mean.) They have said there's a "real" (offline) backup as well, luckily, but that just reinforces that the "pretend" backup was irrelevant and wasn't even worth mentioning in the writeup.
The majority of people have paper documents from the land registry. Digitalization of the land registry is a fairly recent development in Romania so people almost always requests papers when they register their land. In the event that all the digital data or large parts if were lost it would be possible to reconstruct it from the papers and interpolate the missing parts if any.
Offline and pull based backups FTW... This is why I advocate for a pull or at least push/pull model for backups... where the remote system pulls backups out of your production environment, or otherwise from a drop point. Because a corrupt production system that controls backups can corrupt backups.
If your production system at most runs a backup to a drop site, then your backup facilities pull down versioned backups from there, you can better ensure older backup files are intact. More so by not allowing the two to see each other at all and not using backup accounts from a system that can access production resources.
Well, the land registry database in Serbia hasn't been working for two months now; the government hasn't issued any announcement so far, except for generic system-issue information we get from LRD support. Weird, hopefully we weren't hit too
The UK used to have a distributed system - everyone had to have a solicitor store "deeds" of their property, which were a sort of paper blockchain of all the transactions the land had been in since - I don't know, since records began I guess. Since we got a centralised land registry cheaper solicitors have binned these, but some properties still have them as a historical record.
Not sure what you mean by 'binned'. In some Common Law jurisdictions the deed document represents the property and whoever psychically holds of the deed controls the property. Any centralized recording system merely records the last known status of the deed and additional information such as the nominal owner, mortgage holders, etc.
In the UK, the old common law rule does not apply to land that has been registered centrally, that is then the legal definition of who owns the property. However there are still properties that are not registered and for those, the rule you describe is still applicable; the holder of the deeds is the owner.
Registration is now compulsory on sales, but that only came in in 1990.
As to what I mean by binned, I mean literally binned, thrown away.
The same thing happened to Slovakia not that long ago.
The Slovak land register was hacked in January 2025. Hackers uknown encrypted the database, asking for an undisclosed 7-figure amount as ransom.
The whole country's real estate market was paralyzed for about a month. It took couple of months to restore everything from backups and paper agenda and resume normal operation of the land register office.
It was the largest cyber attack in Slovakia's history. The authorities to this day haven't provided any information on who might be behind it. The investigation is still ongoing. Several government figures including the PM were however very eager to immediately point on Ukraine, without any sort of proof.
If I remember correctly, this is the hack that Fico tried to blame on Ukraine, even if the hackers were a known Russian ransomware crew that literally posted in their Telegrams about their support for Russia... right?
Accounts at the time:
"1T+ in assets are frozen as Slovakia's Land Registry faces ransomware attack" <https://spectator.sme.sk/politics-and-society/c/news-digest-...> (9 Jan 2025) HN discussion (1 comment): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42650343>
"Ransomware Attack Paralyzes Slovakian Land Registry, Souring Slovakia-Ukraine Relations" <https://dailysecurityreview.com/security-spotlight/slovakian...> (January 14, 2025)
"Slovakia Hit by Historic Cyber-Attack on Land Registry " <https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/slovakia-hit-by-l...> (10 January 2025)
Apparently tied to Ukraine in this case.
> Apparently tied to Ukraine in this case.
Lord no! That accusation doesn't pass the sniff test.
Try looking further east for the real culprits.
Ukraine was specifically mentioned in two of the articles I'd referenced, though not in the one originally submitted to HN. I was dubious finding it once, hedged with "apparently" based on the 2nd. I did look for a Wikipedia article on the event which might have included a more substantive and reflective post mortem but didn't find one.
If you've specific information clearing or establishing the link, post it. I agree that hasty accusations are risky. The main point I was looking to establish was that the source wasn't indicated as Algerian, as with the Romanian incident.
how did they solve it?
it took months to go back fully online. they also had usable backups (so they used those for the data), but the infrastructure had so many vulnerabilities that they had to fix it first, hence the delay
Restored from very old backups and paper documents.
"Very old" could mean that they were not up to date. What did they do when the backups didn't match the actual situation at the time of the breach?
You do a comparison with the up to date papers. It just takes ages.
The involved parties and the notaries keep copies of every transaction.
> as well as their families being bankrupted permanently
No one thinks bills of attainder are a good idea.
Dibs on Vlad's castle
Why not just change ownership then? I'd bet some people would be interested to pay some money for that...
> HuggingFace got hacked by an AI. What stuck out to me was the guardrail asymmetry. The attacker had no constraints, but HF's response ran afoul of the abuse guardrails, forcing them into an unplanned switch to local models.
This, to me, is the more interesting bit of the article.
I don't really know what a good solution looks like, but yeah, that's annoying.
we spent centuries building a system to track who owns what land and then put the whole thing in one database that can be deleted with a single compromised password
Imagine if the hacker was more clever and started writing plausible nonsense into the database, corrupting the backups.
Selling properties you don't own, ideally land owned by government..
ideally properties of corrupt politicians
This is Government, "plausible nonsense" is already being inserted into every single table on a daily basis.
arte.tv released a documentary about measuring and registering land just a month ago @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl7AfiJs5Gk (Romania: The Unmeasured Land | ARTE.tv Documentary)
Enterprise storage arrays have immutable snapshot functionality that makes ransomware easy to recover from.
What does it take to delete a snapshot?
Depends on the vendor. Some just admin access to the array, other require a two person authorization to delete it.
local admin credentials or two factor or the BEST is a immutable time-lock, so a snapshot cannot be deleted before the retention period that was set when it was taken expires
What's wrong with an old fashioned paper registry then?
It isn't fast enough for mortgage backed securities. Each transfer of ownership of the mortgage requires a separate transfer fee paid to the registry.
Moving from a paper registry at each county clerk (in the US) was a part of the 2008 financial meltdown.
Rotting, sweaty human hands and fire to name a few.
Pretty sure fire is a risk to servers as well.
Servers make it easier to keep & maintain duplicate data in separate locations, which’ll be unlikely to be affected by the same fire.
only in that location.
mirror that DB onto a server on the other side of the country, or continent, etc.
Nothing, this is why they have both.
I am pretty sure they have that too.
So which one is the ground truth if there is a difference between them?
The paper rules supreme in Romanian bureaucracy.
As it should.
fires? floods? documents getting lost/misplaced/stolen/destroyed?
Seems to be rather sturdy in my experience. Would we even be able to read an electronic record after 100 or 200 years of storage? Old piece of paper is quite accessible.
> Old piece of paper is quite accessible
If stored properly.
So are digital copies, though. If stored properly.
And you need to know how to read to read paper copies. Same thing, essentially. Anyone speaking hieroglyphics fluently? Point is, if you take care of your archive and make sure it remains accessible, it doesn't really matter whether it's digital or analog.
There have been plenty of instances of paper-based land registries being wiped out. It's just usually a very local problem because paper lends itself more to decentralized storage
So far accessing old storage media from 50+ years ago hasn't really been a problem. Reading old tapes and punch cards/tapes or even early hard drives is something that a single motivated hobbyist can achieve in a few weeks or months with a microcontroller and patience.
But it's more difficult to imagine that 1000 years from now someone will be able to read from a PCI-E NVME drive if the specs get lost along the way (ignoring for a moment that flash storage most likely won't retain data that long).
Seems like fires and floods would also affect servers too.
Seems like property ownership histories could be one of the few good applications of blockchain technology.
Many many times, entire armies have been sent in to adjust another country's land registry.
aka tokenize everything
Why is deleting the whole database a valid operation? The system should make that impossible.
Hackers would do it from the operating system level - stop the database executable, then delete the files used to store the database. Likewise, many organizations store the backups on a network share, where a hacker could delete the files.
Permissions inside the database should be segregated. The credential used by the webserver should not have enough permissions to DROP DATABASE. Just the appropriate selects/updates/inserts.
Likewise, if you are storing backups on the same network (as opposed to a tape backup), network permissions should allow writes/creates but not deletes.
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.
>had full privileged access to the database
Why does full access include the ability to delete read only data that should never ever be deleted for the rest of time?
It's like building a self destruct button that ignites the physical records. It's an unnecessary risk to make such a dangerous thing.
Well, you don't understand databases. Or software.
would blockchain could have prevented it ?
No.
We will see a lot of those with open source Mythos equivalent models.
The new world will be: move fast and trust AIs
I mean:
> Sources told Risky Business that the hacker entered using valid credentials
This is social engineering or corruption.
... and an incorrect password policy and poor access control. Usually, in these institutions, if STS is not responsible, there are third-party companies, usually proxies, that are responsible for managing the firewall and accessing the data. The lack of procedures and lack of supervision from the authority, combined with the delay from the service providers, leads to a situation where everyone does backups as they think is best. That's why it takes so long now, because STS restores data from different formats, from different places, made at different times
“This is good for AI”
[Fairly off-topic and political]
There's a growing (retarded) perspective, not only here in Romania but in most of the EU, that we must digitalize at all costs; this itself is obviously not a problem, but it usually comes with the removal of the "traditional" options too. The same goes for payments (removal of cash) and basically every aspect of the administration/society where this could be applied. The most recent concrete example for Romania is the mandatory digital signature by ANAF (IRS equivalent) for all companies.
Unlike other regions of the West: NA/WE/rest of the West (SK, JP, etc.), in EE, people (*younger generations, explained below) don't often think about the aspects of confidentiality that much, or if they do, they usually apply it incorrectly (either IRL [filming in public] or online ["I've accepted a draconian TOS that gives the company rights to all of my data, but I haven't actually read any of it, and now I'm invoking my "GDPR rights" against said company."]).
It does not take a genius or a historian to observe that while the older generations do not have this "problem" (they're very skeptical of the gov. [at least in certain aspects], in an almost american fashion — explained by the fact that they've experienced communism), younger generations position themselves in the extreme opposite; they despise the older generations ("boomers") for being luddites and somehow blame them for the gap in civilizational progress between WE and EE. There is a legitimate point here, of course, but it should be noted that the argument is almost always presented in an emotional, overwhelmingly irrational fashion, and almost never includes comparisons between the centralization done by the state in the past [communists] and the new one attempted by current govs [but digitalized]. (This delves into a broader socio-cultural divide between the generations that includes other aspects like religion, traditions, etc.)
The biggest portion of the so-called "IT people" who call for this "digitalization wave" are midwits, "inverse luddites" (they don't care about the implications), and, in smaller numbers, grifters and second-order beneficiaries (on the "digitalization" gov. projects). Obviously, it should be mentioned that, despite progress, nepotism and corruption are still present, and there are cases where gov. contracts are not given to the best candidate.
As a person who's both working in the IT sector and not a boomer (despite the impression of my comment), "we" should be careful about enabling totalitarians in our endeavors."Hackers" is just one reason out of a multitude of other reasons for not abandoning the sacred paper (see the ES+PT incident one year ago).
I don't think that most competent IT people are pushing for digital-only systems. The people that I see pushing for digitalization are either clueless politicians or corrupt or incompetent IT people selling snake oil. The sad part is that the snake oil sellers are probably a majority already, so fighting against politicians and snake oil sellers is a tought one.
[flagged]
Shooting people in the head because they're not wearing a helmet is still a crime.
What's even funnier is getting upset about people not wearing helmets the second you hear about an accident, with no idea whether people did or did not wear helmets. All the article says is that "the hacker entered using valid credentials." There's no information about how they got the credentials.
Victim blaming is a form of self soothing. If you can get yourself to believe they deserved it, then you avoid feeling that the world is dangerous and you might get hurt too.
You can downvote all you want, but there were actual admin accounts with the password P@ssw0rd. So in your view incompetence should just be ignored because blaming people for lack of common sense will hurt their feelings?
In this specific case? Documented?
If so, point to references. Otherwise your original comment reads as unsubstantive. Tropes and cliches may have value because they're often true, but if true, in this case, then share that fact and not the trope alone.
Sincerely, thank you.
Your initial comment would have been far more substantial, and probably much better received, with these additions.
But you still get fined if you don't wear a helmet
In an ideal world, even before you crash your motorcycle and hit your head somewhere, forcing you to start wearing it
I'll never forget this one video. A cyclist riding with a helmet on was doing everything proper -- helmeted, obeying traffic laws, riding in the proper part of the road...
Then a city bus passes them far too close. The passenger side mirror of the bus catches the rider's helmet and speeds off...carrying the cyclist off of their bike and dangling by their helmet at speed...
I will never forget your description of the video :(
Freak accidents occur everywhere. Helmets save a lot more lives then causee deaths overall.
Do you know that this system was making fundamental security faux pas or are you assuming the reductive argument where determined enough hackers couldn’t break any system with built and maintained by diligent engineers?
> Do you know that this system was making fundamental security faux pas or are you assuming the reductive argument where determined enough hackers couldn’t break any system with built and maintained by diligent engineers?
You should take a closer look at the screenshots posted by the hacker: entire systems and network devices with the password P@ssw0rd for the admin user. Now you tell me.
Your comment could have been shortened to:
Take a closer look at the screenshots posted by the hacker: entire systems and network devices with the password P@ssw0rd for the admin user.
Linking those would be bonus.
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
Romanian here. There really were admin accounts with the password Passw0rd, created so that some incompetent political apointees could browse the data.
Gee, I didn't know Moscul is helping the Romanian government too! :-)
I'm a quarter Romanian on my step-mother's side, and I too can confirm that the password was Passw0rd.
If you're using passwords as an authentication methods then you've already lost.
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Amateurs. Everybody knows you should never wipe databases. You should install a cronjob that makes a random, unrecoverable change on a regular (but random) basis.
Was hoping it was a political act in favor of land reform or against owning property.
We had that almost 80 years ago for a few decades, but we shot a guy at the end of it. I hope the next one to suggest something like this remembers the history and refrains from it.
It did help the West, and especially the UK, to get as immigrants very high good plumbers and handy men. The rest of us went into STEM and are now working for FAANGS.
Romania already tried communism. The people did not love it.
"you will own nothing and be happy"..no thank you!
Fair enough. But you do realize that all ownership is a made-up shared fiction that most people believe as real.
As long as trying to break that fiction has real-world consequences like jail time etc., it will work anyway.
That is sufficient to make it real for most intents and purposes.
Why is this skeptical property anti-realism useful? This argument obviously proves too much.
I always thought the “you will own nothing” expression referred to a Gini coefficient of 1, not 0.
The intent of abolishing private property would presumably be the latter.
Capitalists say "you will own nothing" and want a Gini coefficient of 1. Communists don't say "you will own nothing" - they say "abolish private property" and refer to a Gini coefficient of 0.
communists really say "social ownership of the means of production"
Depends on if you're scaremongering about Capitalists or Commies.
That’s true. But in a world with monthly toothbrush subscriptions one of those end states feels much closer than the other.
Finally, AI is giving us some real-world blockchain use cases (assuming the attack was helped by AI). Only half joking, BFT is petty much the most adversary-proof security guarantee we can get in a distributed system.
I would be less comfortable with my land registry tied to a blockchain, as soon as I lose it (who is much more likely to) it's impossible to get my land back.
What's wrong with paper records backup up a digital record and audit trail. This all seems like a solution for a non-problem to me.
A blockchain isn't stopping you from doing any of those things, if anything it's facilitating different backup models by different parties. A paper record is so much more susceptible to various kinds of risks, adversarial and otherwise. I recommend to look past the hype or hate at the technology. A blockchain is the logical extreme of where you end up when you think about how to sync backups, and you recognize that it comes with certain mathematical limitations on how much disruption you can handle.
> A blockchain is the logical extreme of where you end up when you think about how to sync backups
It's not. Blockchains are only eventually consistent among nodes. They're designed for synced backups among adversarial peers.
There's no reason for a government agency to use one internally. There are better ways to sync backups when the people with access to make updates are also authorized to do so.
You can have decentralization without blockchain. A defining feature of blockchain is that each node depends on the precise ordering of prior nodes which is a huge liability if you have network disruptions, etc, in a bureaucracy.
A git repo with cryptographically signed commits solves all the same problems without the headache.
If every notary is a node, you need some mechanism to ensure they perform only legitimate transactions and constantly monitor them. It is easier to just have a central authority.
If they deleted the blockchain db from the nodes, this is still lost.
Blockchain doesn't have anything esp. to do with data loss. It solves exactly one problem which is distributed double spending in accounting ledgers.
A blockchain solves the problem of consensus under Byzantine faults. Payments are an incidental use case, and not even a good one because managing payments including avoiding double spending can be achieved with a weaker primitive than consensus.
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I suppose the idea could be that you have several different institutions holding the same data, which they know is valid because of the Blockchain.
No. Blockchain is made for managing transactions between untrusted parties. In case with a land, there is an authority managing the registry, so a standard relational DB (with optional digital signatures) is the bets option. Why someone wants to use a tool, not good for a specific purpose, for that exact purpose?
So that 50% attack results in someone taking all the land? No thanks.
It is a poor idea to use blockchain for government registries. If you want transparency, simply publish signed daily updates and that's enough. Just use simple DB with backups, and optionally, a printer printing changes on a paper.
Merkel tree audit log of the data, the poor man's Blockchain, works fine and good enough. Now you have a db and you can claim to use a blockchain for pr reasons.
2/3 attack. Read up on BFT.
It doesn't matter, it's a dumb idea anyway because there is a central authority managing the land registry and there is no need for anyone else to be involved.
Also, SQL database is much more convenient to use, it has query language and indices unlike a blockchain.
You can put an index on your blockchain DB, what are you talking? Every node can manage it as it pleases (within the limits of the consensus algorithm).
Yes, if you have a centralized model you don't need it. Just saying that this incident is the exact risk a blockchain is meant to mitigate through redundancy. You can say you don't care about this risk, but it doesn't change the truth of the statement.
Yeah, the overwhelming majority of the benefit of blockchain here is just gotten by making the data public and signed.
Now you may argue "that is a blockchain, not every blockchain is associated with a shitcoin" but to be frank that ship has sailed, if you wanted to defend that you'd have had to do a lot more work over the past decade.
Which could easily be solved by just making data publicly accessible. Actually I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to download land registry say every month. Same actually goes for any stock ownership in companies over certain threshold.
That is what I'm saying. And you may be right, but the security guarantees are math and math is patient. If people decide to ignore it today, it'll still be true any time they decide to take another look.
> It is a poor idea to use blockchain for government registries. If you want transparency, simply publish signed daily updates and that's enough.
A blockchain is essentially that, just with the daily update that's being signed also including the signature and hash of the previous day.
Blockchain as a technology is actually useful here. It does not mean automatically that blocks have to be mined by third parties, although pseudocurrencies have gone that route for decentralization reasons.
Blockchain is unnecessary complicated, for example, it has mining, rewards for those who add new records, even VM and scripts and all of these are not needed for a government registry. I do not need scripts within a land registry.
Clearly, you would scope the features and choose implementation options so that it makes sense for the use case. Mining (ie PoW and/or Nakamoto consensus) is clearly inferior to any deterministic consensus here. A cryptocurrency isn't necessary and would be a distraction. But at least some limited programmability could make sense (eg for escrow).
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.
> Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people
In a similar vein, I was once curious how you would prove your identity if ALL of your relevant documents (passport, driver's license, birth certificate etc) were lost in some kind of cataclysm e.g. a house fire pre-digital etc
Turns out there is actually a mechanism for this:
- get multiple people to sign sworn affidavits that you are who you say you are
- that begins the "paper trail" of evidence that allows you to start getting the rest of the document chain
- you rebuild from there.
If you're married, there is already a similar process for when a spouse takes the last name of the other spouse. The marriage certificate is the first step and then it goes from there for driver's license, passport, credit cards and so on.
Do the people who sign sworn affidavits already have to have proven identities? If so, then they're unable to recover from a situation where they lost everyone's identity.
Yeah it's actually not that bad, because for example the BMV will likely upon request send you a duplicate driver's license to your address of record. Same for getting replacement credit cards. If you had utility services at that address in your name that's additional documentation. Also historical tax returns, bank accounts, etc.
Fun fact, if you're unlucky enough to replace your Social Security card 10 times, they will no longer issue them to you anymore. It is a lifetime limit, and they fan it out to 3 per year.
Oddly enough, if you legally change your name, they will send you a new one regardless of the limit.
Afterwards, you have to make an appointment to see them in person. Until then, you can order them online or via snailmail.
At least you can restore it. Imagine all your devices are lost in a massive fire, is there a way to get back your apple account?
Phone number and email access, if you can regain access to them.
It is definitely a good idea to plan in advance and set up a recovery contact: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102641
If you're married and Jewish, the wife's mother keeps the marriage document, so even if there is a house fire and all documents are lost, your mother in law usually lives in another house, so you can pick it up from there.
There is little alternative.
A great-great grandfather of mine was mayor of a town through which the front passed twice during WWI. All that survived were basements. Your father's account more or less describes the process by which the land was reparceled.
There are also physical markers in the ground at the corners of most properties. So if you had to, you could send a surveyor out to recertify boundaries. That would get very expensive quickly, however.
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.
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.
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)
Sods law would be the only bank not affected would be those I owe money to
Your best chance would probably be mailed statements
And this is why we need title insurance :(
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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.
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.
Hah, scan-dal.
Is this the scandal to which you are referring?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23588202
Yes, that is what they're referring to. The technical details behind it are kind of cool. It's a "bug" of the JBIG2 compression algorithm. See 1, 2
[1] https://community.apryse.com/t/jbig2-compression-issue/1814
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2#Character_substitution_e...
All I see is 1, 1
There‘s also a great conference talk [0] on this, with an english translation [1].
[0]: https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0
[1]: https://youtu.be/zXXmhxbQ-hk
Yes, several national archives where affected on all settings. If a institution scanned and archived documents with these- these documents are - in theory challenge-able in court- within reason..
I am pretty sure I was bitten by this bug, or a similar bug, on an IRA transfer form that I uploaded to a bank. On the scan that I uploaded, one digit in the account number was a clean "5", but the customer service person said it looked like a good clean "6". I presume their document management system was an outcropping of a system originally set up for dealing with faxes, and used that or a similar compression algorithm.
Thus - one could assume that all transfers stored by the bank- before the update would not hold up in court.
I don't know what you mean by "hold up in court". This seems to be an instance of software engineers making sweeping prognostications about legal matters.
"Hold up in court" as in was it duly executed and filed by a certain date, regardless of the time and extra management required for the bank's performance? Yes, why not.
"Hold up in court" against someone claiming it was an unauthorized transfer? Even without the bug, that can be contested in many straightforward ways!
But unless there is a specific legal claim that hinges on the bug being significant, it's pretty irrelevant "in court". I knew about this precisely because the transfer failed to go through due to redundancy - one digit in account numbers is generally a check digit, plus account titles and whatnot.
In general you can always challenge the validity of scanned documents, regardless of known software bugs or not! Just like you can always challenge that a paper document is a forgery. You need a specific argument and some evidence though!
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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
If its at least somewhat recent hopefully those affected still have paperwork for any property ownership transfers. Finding proof of property you bought decades ago would be a huge pain.
The problem is that everything will potentially be under dispute, since anyone can claim they purchased a patch of land whose registry was missed in the restoration
Here in Brazil lots of people deal land by word of mouth. The country is just too big and there isn't enough state present to make every transaction official, so people shake on it, draft an unofficial document and actually living and developing the land over a long period of time is what consistitutes ownership.
e.g. if you made a big buy there ought to be records of a bank transfer, mortgage, etc.
"i paid for 30 acres here at $xx rate, and here is the mortgage docs from the bank dated March 19th that I signed, plus their valuation of the property and what went into it"
Only if you bought between the backup date and today
(And obviously has some doc to prove it)
It depends. In my country the online land register data is just a copy of the physical land owning certificate. The physical certificates (1 for the owner, 1 for the local government, and at least 1 more for some document keeping agency) are the source of truth.
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.
In such case notaries (or whoever reports transaction) can resubmit them.
Also, you still have paper documents, kept by parties to transaction, right?
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.
My reading is: "The agency would surely be panicking more than this if they didn't have an offline backup".
"Offline backup", as in "thousands of shelves full of dusty binders spread across offices all over the country"?
"And to think that we just finished digitizing all those paper files five years ago! Oh well, back to square one..."
I think the "offline" part is what is that "appears" to be, clearly they have backups somewhere, but maybe the attacker just missed to wipe some other "online" location.
I interpreted this as a vagueness related to the reporting accuracy, not the existence of a backup.
> 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
> 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.
Squatters, boundary disputes and rent defaults happen all the time.
Plus having most of your net worth locked up in something no sane person would consider buying off you because you can't prove you own it is ... suboptimal
People can come and cut down trees, use the land for their cattle, raise crops or just start building something. If you don't challenge it and they get away with it for a while, they could even gain use of the land legally.
Happens far more often than you would think in developing countries.
Property lines disputes happen every single day in America, too. It's a universal thing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg15ev0347o
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
i think it is a very happy time charging whatever per hour you want
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
In the UK deeds no longer really exist and do not take precedence over the land registry.
Property that isn't registered can remain unregistered but must be registered before it is sold.
At least in my EU country, no the digital record is the primary.
When you buy property you get a deed for the land, but the details of a property can change after that. The deed also doesn't contain ownership, it just says what is on the land. It's common for land to have multiple owners (1/32 is not unheard of) due to inheritance.
I'm building a house, the land deed just has the land plot as we bought it, until the house is 100% finished (and registered) we will not get an updated deed, although the digital system has newer data (you need to register the construction progress).
Paper records burn great and are harder to store in multiple locations
They're also often stored in basements, which is the first to flood.
Faxes and photocopiers have existed for nearly a century
OK but the primary record itself is not the primary record when challenged in court; subject to a change order; redefined by legislation or handled in many other ways. There is money involved.
Any country big enough was moving digital first/digital only for years. And with a paper records there is always a question if this one is the last one and contains a valid data or it's from years ago and since then everything was changed multiple times.
Just recently I've seen a 30 y.o. deed on some commercial property. Despite it was valid and predated the digital era, it had almost nothing common with the things on the ground.
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.
There are many examples of important paper records (property, birth/death, etc) being lost in fires or floods, so it's not the case that "everything worked perfectly fine" in those days either.
All those examples are not different from not having backups of digital data too. Making copies when you microfiche, having duplicate stores, it's all exceptionally easy and a solved problem.
And of course everything didn't work perfectly, it did however work "perfectly fine", which means "very well" or "good enough". Meanwhile, adding in network connectivity to anything vital these days is just insanely dumb.
No software is secure, and will never ever be secure. Ever. Anyone who thinks that software can be made secure, is 100% wrong, period. My point is that the advantages aren't worth the disadvantages.
Everything comes with a risk, and people usually take it with a decent understanding of how to mitigate it mostly.
If we start thinking along the lines of technology has risk and we shouldn't use it, we should go back all the way to the discovery of fire as we all know fire can cause a lot of damage if in the wrong hands.
Technology can make lives safer. However, software is never secure, cannot be made secure, this is empirically proven to be a 100% valid position.
In as software is not secure, and can not be made secure, using it for important records storage makes zero sense, unless you a) have full backups offline in physical, non-digital, read only medium or b) just don't do it online, at all.
And my point is, it's not worth the convenience.
One more reason to to define the whole infrastructure in code and have offline backups. Recovering could be measured in hours.
A backup that isn't offline is not really a backup as it far too easy to destroy it even by accident/carelessness/lack of understanding.
When I was responsible for backups we kept the tape cartridges in a fire safe in a different building. We took a full backup weekly and moved the tape from the robot to the firesafe as soon as the backup was complete. Only the daily incremental backups stayed in the robot for more than a day.
That sounds good, but wouldn’t you worry that the same hackers will let themselves in via the same route again?
You would need to understand first how they gained access and verify that they can’t do the same again. That in itself could take days if not weeks. Then of course they might have found new vulnerabilities while they were in, so you would need to worry about that too.
> has entire infra in code
> spinning up a new shard takes a quarter
Both can be true
Only if you routinely test it, and if that kind of access to the offline backup is low friction enough to be doing that monthly, it might not be enough of a redundancy.
> Recovering could be measured in hours.
Yes, even hundreds of them sometimes.
The most time consuming part of recovering from an attack is validating everything. It takes more than a few hours to validate the infra that stays put isn’t compromised, the IaC code itself isn’t compromised, deploy the infra, bring a copy of the offline backup of your data (your IaC can’t drive to another site and bring the backups, then make a copy, unless tou are really sure you removed any trace of compromise), validate that the backup is sound, then restore it.
In some cases the infrastructure part is the least time consuming. Some platforms are straight forward enough that even manual deployment is fast. But after a hack you can’t trust anything so you need to do the slow validation that takes longer than your projected “hours”.
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