News: 0144855992

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US Arrests Suspect Who Wanted To Blow Up AWS Data Center (therecord.media)

(Friday April 09, 2021 @11:30PM (BeauHD) from the mentally-deranged dept.)


An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record:

> The FBI has arrested on Thursday a Texas man who [1]planned to blow up one of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in an attempt to "kill of about 70% of the internet." Seth Aaron Pendley, 28, of Wichita Falls, Texas, was arraigned in front of a Texas judge today and formally indicted with a malicious attempt to destroy a building with an explosive.

>

> The US Department of Justice said Pendley was arrested on Thursday after he tried to acquire C-4 plastic explosives from an undercover FBI employee in Fort Worth, Texas. The FBI said they learned of Pendley's plans after the suspect confided in January 2021 via Signal, an encrypted communications app, to a third-party source about plans to blow up one of Amazon's Virginia-based data centers. The source alerted the FBI and introduced the suspect to the undercover agent on March 31.

"The suspect allegedly told an FBI agent that he wanted to attack Amazon's data center because the company was providing web servers to the FBI, CIA, and other federal agencies and that he hoped to bring down 'the oligarchy' currently in power in the United States," the report says.

Pendley could face up to 20 years in federal prison if he's found guilty and convicted.



[1] https://therecord.media/us-arrests-suspect-who-wanted-to-blow-up-aws-data-center/

Not doing enough to address mental illness, folks. (Score:2)

by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 )

I mean, 10% of the internet tops.

Pretty stupid plot (Score:2)

by SuperKendall ( 25149 )

Does this dude have any idea how big most data centers are?

I mean, maybe the guy could have taken out several racks of highly redundant servers, and triggered the Novec dump. It would have been annoying to a few data center techs but that's about it.

Even if you did have some magic thing that would take out a whole Amazon data center, I'd wager that every single server in the place had counterparts in other regions that would just keep humming along as if nothing had occurred.

The only thing we really still

Re: (Score:2)

by operator_error ( 1363139 )

I hear you.

For a citation as to potential damage I offer that incident at the AT&T data center in Nashville just last Christmas which took out a surprisingly large chunk of the regional internet for well over a day.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nashville_bombing#Damage_and_service_outages

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