Kyoto is renowned for its scientific and research expertise, particularly in the field of chemistry, where it ranks fourth in the world. Biology, pharmacology, immunology, material science, and physics are among areas where the university contributes. The Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe presently operates the world’s most powerful supercomputer, known as Fugaku. Fujitsu’s Fugaku exascale system has a computational performance of 442 PFLOPS, followed by IBM’s Summit supercomputer, which has a much lower computational performance of 148 PFLOPS and is ranked second on the global list. Fugaku cost $1.2 billion to build and has been utilized for COVID-19 research, diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, and virus transmission simulations so far.
The Kyoto University in Japan has reported a security incident due to which it lost about 77TB of research data. The incident happened due to an error in the backup system of its Hewlett-Packard supercomputer.
The incident occurred between December 14 and 16, 2021, and resulted in 34 million files from 14 research groups being wiped from the system and the backup file.
After investigating to determine the impact of the loss, the university concluded that the work of four of the affected groups could no longer be restored.
All affected users have been individually notified of the incident via email, but no details were published on the type of work that was lost, except the notification on their website.
At the moment, the backup process has been stopped. To prevent data loss from happening again, the university has scrapped the backup system and plans to apply improvements and re-introduce it in January 2022.
The plan is to also keep incremental backups – which cover files that have been changed since the last backup happened – in addition to full backup mirrors.
Recommendation
It goes unmentioned that data very valuable and shall be subjected to suitable security controls. It is recommended that organizations perform thorough assessments of its assets and enforce suitable controls as per their risk apetite. Performing periodic business impact analysis (BIA) and Business Continuity exercises would help a long way, even for small and medium enterprises. It often helps to hire independent consultation to review your BIA and BCP assessments.
