this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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Dutch authorities seized one of Windscribe VPN's servers – here's everything we know (www.techradar.com)
submitted 1 week ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to c/technology@lemmy.zip
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The VPN provider said no user data will be compromised

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[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 18 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I have seen devices that can allow an American power plug to be transfered from one powered outlet to another, specifically to allow police to capture running servers so the RAM isn't cleared.

I have also heard of RAM being frozen with liquid nitrogen while powered on to allow later analysis.

The first part is less of a problem in this case as the outlets are different here, but to completely defeat this sort of power manipulation servers can easily be designed with internal switches that releases as the server is pulled from the rack, cutting the power internally.

That also reduces the effectiveness of the second attack, which is easy to reduce further by simply making the case take longer to open.

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yep came here to say this, it being a ram only server doesn't really help against government level attacks.

There's a decent chance the server itself had dual power supplies, in which case you could just unplug one and plug it into a battery and you're good to go. That simplifies things quite a bit.

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago

Ah, yeah, didn't think of that, good point!

[–] Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You can put safety checks on the cabinet

Temperature sensors, sensors on cabinet drawers/doors etc

And do a system wipe if that happens

Those kinds of systems are used in a ton of other places already. Cars for example

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Absolutely, I was just thinking about how to do it cheap and simple.

There was an old Defcon talk about something similar, how to make a system to physically destroy hard drives using a mechanism inside a server that could be triggered automatically or remotely.

They tried a bunch of things from thermite to acids, but didn't get anywhere really.

It made me think however....

What about injecting sand into the drives and actuating the read/write head?

I have seen photos of a hard drive crash, where the head grinded off all of the magnetic layer from the platters.

My idea was to inject sand as a grinding agent and use the read/write head as a grinder to do the same thing.

Then I realized that if you are a huge customer, you can probably have custom hard drives on order, these drives could have a dedicated physical grinding arm, designed so that once deployed it would quickly grind the magnetic layer off of the platters.

Now SSD have made these concepts mostly redundant, but still a fun thought experiment.

[–] SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz 6 points 1 week ago

None of that is necessary these days; all you need is to scrub the encryption keya from RAM and cache.

The issue is reliably detecting tampering without undue false alarms.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Just encrypt the drive and store the key somewhere easier to destroy.

[–] Korkki@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Couldn't you just set a weekly or daily cronjob to reboot the servers and have some balance loader redirect traffic? No more ram fingerprints after that.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago

Just log nothing. Reconnect circuits often. Shouldn't be anything in ram but the current connection stream.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 6 points 1 week ago

I like how techradar removed the Epstein files comment from the tweet

[–] joshcodes@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago

So obviously its not a foolproof plan but wouldn't you just dump the RAM while the machine is on? Dont you just copy /tmp or something and analyse that?

I suppose I'm assuming they can get shell access now that I think about it so probably a stupid question