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SSD belonging to Euro-cloud Scaleway was stolen from back of a truck, then turned up on YouTube

Has since been recovered, and Scaleway now ships disks with GPS trackers

It sounds like a "dog ate my homework" excuse for the cloud age, but Euro-cloud Scaleway says one of its solid-state disks was stolen from a truck, turned up in the hands of a YouTuber, and has now made its way back home.

A Saturday post by CEO Yann Lechelle revealed that over a year ago, a disk was stolen while in transit between two Scaleway data centres.

Fast forward to 2021 and a YouTuber bought the disk on a classified ads site called Leboncoin. Specifically, a YouTuber called Micode who creates content about the persistence of data even after disks are formatted.

Lechelle said Scaleway worked with the YouTuber to recover the disk. The French-language video creator has written to Scaleway with assurances they have not copied the information contained on the disk. It is said some customer data was on the drive, unencrypted, including the source code and SSH keys of an Italian VPS provider.

If you understand French, you can catch the final part of Micode's video series on the purloined Scaleway SSD here, which was uploaded on July 23, the day before Lechelle emitted his blog post.

We're told Scaleway has alerted its clients to the incident.

The CEO said recovering the disk helped the authorities to advance their investigations into the heist, and meant the company felt able to publicly disclose the theft.

The cloudy company has since revisited its data transfer policies, and now ships disks in sealed cases equipped with GPS trackers. Obviously it has no desire to have to explain such an improbable security story – for any incident of any origin – ever again. ®

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