@tryptameanie 981575 wrote:
Surely measures can be taken to protect the server against people physically accessing a system? I understand the hardware needs maintaining but it sees like madness that people would allow anyone with access to a datacentre to access their system….
@Benj@min 981577 wrote:
im sure there are some closed areas, but if he would he could, he’s the brainy one in the family.
But he would never
Much depends on the contracts between the business and its customers and the domestic law of where the servers are.
Outside of specific cases (such as criminal investigations or a sysadmin working for a company monitoring other employees) it is normally illegal to access private data without permission and/or a good reason to do so.
Under UK law I can legitimately activate “GCHQ mode” on Office 365 and haul all sorts of data sent through the service across to one of my local PC’s to inspect the contents – not to catch anybody out but to identify such issues such as bounced emails due to the DNS change, misconfigured client software or network errors – with this sort of bulk data collection you are often looking for what isn’t in the dataset (but was expected to be found there!)
Many hosting companies do make it a condition of the contract that users must not use the service for anything illegal/unethical – the server admin also usually has to comply with various rules set the Communications Ministry about not allowing data to be transmitted that could cause problems to networks elsewhere and providing agreed levels of service (which can include privacy safeguards).
The NL provider I use does not filter any other traffic and provides a genuine VPS with direct access to the virtual machine (many others do not, causing unexpected problems when trying to host some apps) but to allow emails to be sent the DNS settings must be 100% correct – this is fair enough as NL has a lot of reputation problems due to local and Russian hackers targeting the entire world with scam emails, ransomwhere etc.
A couple of years ago the electricity went off across their whole datacentre for a few minutes. The apology email I got (3 times as I have 2 other VPS from the same company in my own name purchased at different times) claimed only one corridor had gone off supply – I did think it odd that all 3 servers would have been affected although interference on a power cable from the electricity company and TN (combined earth/neutral) supplies that infest much of Europe can upset UPS and generator backup systems so they do not operate correctly or worse let the surge current through the protective earth into the downstream equipment where it knackers power supplies (I have had to rescue systems when this has happened).
a few minutes later the provider refunded all the Euros I had paid for the entire month for all the servers (in UK you might get about €5 back from British Telecom if you can be bothered to wait 30 minutes for the call centre to answer). not sure if all NL providers do this but got the impression from the Agentschap Telecom keep a closer watch on service quality than many other countries.
It may also be the case (particularly in Northern Europe) that a smaller server admin is trusted and respected by the end users s/he helps them with developing whatever apps the server is used for (or they would have just used one of the big cloud providers) and thus has permission to access the end user data (it would be near impossible to test the apps without this)
