Data Center Facility Vulnerabilities Assessment

Abstract Data center facilities are at the heart of today's electronic infrastructure, giving life to significant percentage of online commerce. Due to their planned construction on critical infrastructure, such as converging power grids and dense telecom networks, they are also, however largely unguarded potential targets for terrorists. Data centers are among the only facilities located globally within proximity to mission critical infrastructure where even a lightly funded individual is able to install heavy equipment virtually unchecked and undisturbed for long periods of time, using a remote high-Qos network (the Internet) as a detonator. Because private data centers are largely ubiquitous in their procedures, which typically do not include hardware inspection, this would allow a terrorist group to launch a distributed, coordinated attack taking out many large cities' infrastructures simultaneously, and without prior detection. Download the Paper