In the US, a man had plans to explode an Amazon data centre. He wanted to shut down ‘about 70 percent of the internet’.
28-year-old Seth Aaron Pendley was arrested last Thursday. The FBI tracked him down after he made certain statements on a file for militia groups. He also bragged on Facebook about his presence in the attack on the US Capitol in early January.
Also, a tipster passed on the man’s email address. A second tipster knew that the man had plans to attack a large data centre with C-4 explosives and shut down about 70 percent of the internet.
To be clear, the latter is not correct. Even though AWS, the data centre division of Amazon, is the largest cloud provider in the US, it does not provide 70 percent of the internet.
Also, most data and applications are stored in multiple data centres. A successful attack would seriously disrupt those services, but most could theoretically work from a different location after a few hours.
The FBI managed to arrest Pendley by using an undercover agent as an alleged arms dealer. He is facing twenty years in prison. Amazon itself thanks to the FBI for locating and arresting the man.