Expert: Middle East attacks on data centers highlight need for protections

In the widening U.S./Israeli conflict with Iran, data centers have become military targets, causing service outages and threatening billions of dollars of investment by U.S. companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.

“Data centers are becoming an essential part of modern infrastructure, and many digital services depend on them,” said Virginia Tech cybersecurity expert Murat Kantarcioglu. “Just as people plan for power outages after a storm, users and consumers may increasingly need to prepare for scenarios in which a digital service is unavailable for an extended period.”

While the recent Amazon Web Services outages caused by Iranian drone strikes did not threaten U.S. data centers or their users, “it is becoming increasingly evident that any single data center can be affected by a broad spectrum of threats, ranging from cyberattacks to physical attacks. Organizations should therefore plan with these risks explicitly in mind,” he said.

In most cases, data centers are designed with internal redundancy to tolerate routine hardware failures, according to Kantarcioglu. “However, if the entire data center is destroyed, the data would typically be unrecoverable unless copies exist in another data center.”

Data center damage and losses could also affect researchers in a broad range of critical areas, from health care to cybersecurity and defense. Using smaller, decentralized AI systems could provide protection. 

“Building research programs on their own infrastructure using small generative AI models, whenever possible, may help reduce both researchers’ dependence on external providers and their overall costs,” he said.

The risks of disruptions and data losses are low for everyday users of cloud-based services, Kantarcioglu said.

“There is always some possibility that some data could be lost due to cyberattacks or other reasons. As a precaution, I recommend backing up sensitive and critical cloud-stored data to locally kept, encrypted external hard drives. Encryption is especially important, as you do not want unauthorized parties to gain easy access to the data,” he said.

About Kantarcioglu
Murat Kantarcioglu is a professor of computer science in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on data and artificial intelligence, security and privacy, and blockchain data analytics. Read more about Murat Kantarcioglu.

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To schedule an interview, please contact: Margaret Ashburn at mkashburn@vt.edu or 540-529-0814.