SSD belonging to Euro-cloud Scaleway was stolen from back of a truck, then turned up on YouTube It sounds like a "dog ate my homework" excuse for the cloud age, but Euro-cloud Scaleway says one of its solid-state disks was stolen from a truck, turned up in the hands of a YouTuber, and has now made its way back home. A Saturday post by CEO Yann Lechelle revealed that over a year ago, a disk was stolen while in transit …
Did they ever mention what kind of truck it "went missing" from?
Logistics carriers (in particular package companies, imagine UPS/DHL/etc.) often end up with 40ft containers full of undelivered packages, your contract with them usually even says that after X attempts to deliver, the package is legally there's and they basically just sell the contents onto a weird community of people who basically buy the packages in bulk, with the intention of selling the contents, or for weirder shipments, selling them back to the original shipper.
So in that situation, I could well imagine a tech interested in hard drives buying 'lost in transit' hard drives, and then buying one & getting in contact with them. I work in a sales department shipping internationally, and we've probably had 4-5 incidents where packages worth more than £10k just went missing, only to reappear on eBay, or with some weird middleman trying to sell them back to us (with confirmed serial numbers).
Joe Lycett did a piece on Hermes reselling of 'undeliverable' parcels a couple of years ago. And found that lots of the parcels that were being sold off as undeliverable had clear sender details on them and Hermes had made no attempt to return them back to the sender, like they are supposed to.
I myself have had a few parcels go missing that were sent with Hermes and every parcel I send has my return address on it, yet never had one of them returned and had to claim for a lost parcel.
I can believe that. I ordered a portable A/C unit a couple of months ago. It was supposed to be delivered by Hermes and their own tracking showed it being picked up and taken to their Warrington warehouse. After that no other movements were recorded. After a week the reseller refunded me and I took my business elsewhere.
There's clearly no way that a portable A/C unit (over a metre tall, weighing in excess of 20kg) can get misplaced. It's hardly likely to have been dropped and accidentally kicked under a bench. Nor is it likely to have got pushed off said bench and fallen down the back.
Something nefarious happened to it.
Given my experience with Hermes - both for work and home deliveries, I wouldn't entrust them with anything of mine
They've tried to dodge their responsibilities by using "Photographic evidence of delivery (handed to recipient)" showing the package perched on a fence next to a footpath (lasted about 5 minutes before being stolen) or on the mat in front of a closed door clearly labelled with the wrong address
The factor that the photos PROVE misdelivery seems to escape their notice
Yup: Had the Hermes 'photo' proof of delivery - to my neighbour. Only they were standing where the neighbour's car would be had they been in and there was no parcel in view. The photo was also taken on a dry, sunny day when the delivery date was overcast and had rained that morning. They also didn't take a photo of my door as they never approached it else I'd have sent them a picture - date/time stamped - of them taking the photo.
Yes, I have a motion sensor door camera - it's the doorbell so useful if I'm out back or up top of the house as I can at least tell them I'll be a minute...
Improbable, but not impossible.
c't magazine regularly buys random drives on eBay to look for residual data and where the drives come from. They've had drives from refurbishers, who took old council computers, simply removed the drives and stuffed them on eBay, for example.
Old photocopier drives also often come to light...
There are plenty of people out there, who look into the security of 2nd hand devices and 2nd hand storage, so it isn't as improbable as it seems. The odds are still fairly high, but not astronomically so.
My niece worked at specialty steel fabricator. When they replaced a bunch of PCs, they took the drives out to the fabrication yard, neatly laid them out on the ground and then brought over a crane with a "magnetic hook" rated for 50 tons. Lowered the hook over the drives and turned in on.
Apparently, this caused all the drives to stand up on end and wave back and forth until the hook was turned off.
Checking random drives afterwards showed nothing on them, not even formatting.
Or for bigger payloads, how about Vultures?
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There's such a thing as "all publicity is good publicity" but I think this is an exception in this case.
The final YouTube video on this saga is here. It's all in French. If an English-speaking YTer picked this up, I would expect this to be all over the news more.
C.
> A Saturday post by CEO Yann Lechelle revealed that over a year ago, a disk was stolen while in transit between two Scaleway data centres.
The blog post was published after the 3 part video series by Micode (started in May 2021), and after someone named Scaleway as the provider on LowEndTalk: https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/172819/scaleway-ssd-with-customer-data-purchased-on-classified-ads-website-by-french-vlogger
> Scaleway warned clients about the incident.
Not until June 2021, according to one of the customers who had their data exposed.
> Then, nothing happened until, according to Lechelle, a YouTuber bought the disk on a classifieds site.
Indeed, including not releasing a public statement until over 2 months after they were aware of the incident: https://twitter.com/Micode/status/1395640486715662336
> It sounds like a "dog ate my homework" excuse for the cloud age
It is. Affected customers were warned in June 2021, after Scaleway were contacted by Micode. Scaleway did not publish a public statement regarding the incident until after their name was already being thrown around Twitter, YouTube, and LowEndTalk.
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