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The cloud is actually just a server that belongs to someone else.
This is what John Matze, boss and founder of the legal alternative social network Parler, has to learn the hard way: On Sunday, Amazon's cloud hosting subsidiary AWS threw Parler off its servers without further ado and terminated the hosting contract due to a violation of the usage guidelines.
Because on Parler, supporters of the still-US President Donald Trump had planned to storm the US Parliament in the days before January 6th and had violent fantasies: the more extreme Trump fans wanted to hang, shoot, slay all opponents of the Democratic Party, especially enemy images like Nancy Pelosi, but also the former Trump supporter and US Vice President Mike Pence.
They should all suffer once the right wing invaded the Capitol building.
After the acts of January 6th, many users boasted about how they had devastated the Capitol, and posted videos and photos in the first euphoria.
It wasn't until the FBI arrested the first ringleaders that right-wing Parler users realized that it might be time to delete all the incriminating material.
New video shows the violence with which the mob rioted in the Capitol
The US is still in shock.
A new video shows the brutal and inhuman violence of the mob against the police inside the Capitol.
Meanwhile, there is growing concern that this onslaught has not yet bottomed out.
Source: WELT / Dagmar Boehning
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But not only John Matze now has to internalize the matter with the other's server, but also his users.
Because Parler, it turns out, was programmed very sloppily from an IT security perspective.
If a user clicked on "Delete", the Parler servers did not delete the postings at all, they just stopped displaying them.
But they are retained on the hard drives.
At the same time, a security hole in the code of the site made it possible for strangers to log into the Parler servers in Amazon's data center as administrators with appropriate user rights.
Administrators, however, could see all of the users' posts - including those that were deleted.
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When an anonymous Viennese IT security specialist who writes on Twitter under the name “Crash override” discovered this gap at the weekend, she realized that she could secure evidence - and began to create an archive of all posts on Parler, too the deleted.
The hacker, who claims to be 26, knew that time was running out - last week Amazon had already threatened to delete the Parler data.
So she called for help - and got it.
Dozens of IT specialists organized themselves via Twitter and systematically pulled all the material from the servers using a database script - some at 1.6 gigabits per second.
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When Amazon shut down the Parler server on Sunday evening, the researchers said they had backed up 99.9 percent of all material available on Parler, including thousands of videos with metadata such as the location and time of the recording - relevant if this can be used to prove that the recordings were made on March 6th January in Washington DC.
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Only what was publicly viewable online on Parler at least once at any given time was saved - private user data such as names and e-mail addresses that were not public were not saved.
The researchers now want to make the data set, which is more than 70 terabytes in size, public - for research into extremist networks in the USA and worldwide, but also to preserve evidence.
Ex-Parler users are also aware of how explosive the material is.
In the relevant sub-forums of Reddit, sheer panic broke out on Monday when users realized what hadn't been deleted from the cloud servers in time.
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"All that remains now is to be prepared for the consequences," writes a user under the name "North Central Florida Patriots".
In the past few days, federal authorities began their investigations into the storming of the Capitol and arrested the first perpetrators.
Dozens of extremists have also lost their jobs after being publicly identified in footage taken from Capitol Hill.