Hidden systems, hidden risks: Best infosec long reads 7/18/26

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7/18/26: This week's long reads peel back the abstractions that shape modern digital life. They reveal the largely invisible infrastructure, institutions, and people we depend on—from data centers and open-source software to messaging platforms, surveillance systems, and government databases—and what happens when those hidden foundations become points of failure, control, or exploitation.

How a Gang of Thieves Pulled Off a Multimillion-Dollar Data Center Heist

For The New York Times, novelist Nathaniel Rich reconstructs the 2007 robbery of a Verizon data center in London, where thieves posing as police officers stole roughly 80 servers allegedly containing evidence of subprime mortgage fraud, turning an audacious burglary into a meditation on the physical vulnerability of the world's digital infrastructure.

The world’s most valuable commodity is not stored in banks, jewelry boutiques or the Louvre. It lives in giant, anonymous, energy-devouring warehouses filled with fiber-optic cables, industrial-scale cooling systems and server racks.

The latest generation of data centers will mainly be used, at a cost of several trillion dollars, to power artificial intelligence. Until now, however, the primary function of data centers has been to store the world’s information. The entire searchable internet, for instance, lives in data centers. But that’s not all. Data centers also store most private digital systems: your email accounts; your medical, pension and educational records; every book and archive ever digitized; every social network and dating app; every government and corporate database. Nearly any time you access electronic data — any time you swipe or scroll or speak a voice command — you rely on the services of a data center.

The public fogginess about data centers is not an accident. It is the product of a willful strategy by the world’s largest tech corporations, whose business models rest on the public assumption that the internet, and all the data it holds, is as immaterial as air — or as a cloud, to borrow the metaphor commonly used to describe the sum of information stored on servers. As the digital-media scholar Tung-Hui Hu writes in “A Prehistory of the Cloud,” the cloud “hides its physical location by design.”

This use of “cloud” dates back at least as far as the mid-1990s, but it didn’t enter the public consciousness for another decade, after the chief executives of Amazon and Google began to market the wonders of “cloud computing.” Information, they declared, had been liberated — emancipated from the prison of the desktop computer and evaporated into the atmosphere. The cloud soon became a permanent feature of the cultural landscape. Many of us began to believe that digital information had actually become vaporous. The metaphor evoked mantras that tech boosters recited with religious zeal, like “Everything is connected” or “Information wants to be free.”

But information does not float in the air. It is encoded on servers: computers without monitors or keyboards, rectangular boxes dotted with blinking LEDs, stacked in vast grids held in warehouses. Our phones and tablets and laptops are so light because they contain little more than a screen, a battery and an antenna. Their powers are merely borrowed, at up to 1,000 megabits per second, from data centers.

By the time Ellis learned about the Verizon job, data collection had quietly become the most critical economic force in modern life. “Data is the new oil,” the British mathematician and data scientist Clive Humby wrote in 2006, an expression that quickly assumed the status of an adage. In the last two decades, data storage has grown into the core business of some of the world’s most valuable corporations. Amazon, for instance, is not, primarily, an e-commerce business. It is a data storage business: Amazon Web Services, the data server provider it started in 2006, accounts for more than half of its profits, and in some quarters as much as 74 percent of its profits. A.W.S.’s clients include, among others, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Treasury, the National Security Agency, the I.R.S. and The New York Times.

Google Cloud represents 15 percent of Alphabet’s income, but it is its fastest-growing division. Microsoft recently disclosed that its own fastest-growing revenue source was its data storage services, which it groups together under the rubric Intelligent Cloud; it hosts the British government, Starbucks, Shell, OpenAI and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Amazon and the other data behemoths speak of the value of their data center operations about as openly as they do their internal algorithms. For two years after building its first data center, Google refused to acknowledge it existed; to this day, it requires visitors to all its centers to sign nondisclosure forms. Amazon and Microsoft still do not disclose the exact number or size of their data centers, indicating their locations only by region or “availability zone.”

Why the secrecy? It’s hard to tell exactly. A guardedness about proprietary business operations is part of the explanation. An effort to conceal the environmental cost is another: Between the energy consumption of the servers and the cooling systems that prevent them from bursting into flames, data centers are responsible for the release of monstrous quantities of greenhouse gases. The largest data centers can consume the energy of two million homes. If the world’s data centers made up a 51st American state, it would rank second in energy consumption, just behind Texas.

But the most likely rationale for the tech companies’ reluctance to discuss the details of their core business is related to security. The anonymous warehouses we call data centers are the lockbox of the global economy.