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EU data localization regulations limit data transfers to non-EU countries with the GDPR. However, BGP, DNS and other Internet protocols were not designed to enforce jurisdictional constraints, so implementing data localization is challenging. Despite initial research on the topic, little is known about if or how companies currently operate their server infrastructure to comply with the regulations. We close this knowledge gap by empirically measuring the extent to which servers and routers that process EU requests are located outside of the EU (and a handful of 'adequate' non-EU countries). The key challenge is that both browser measurements (to infer relevant endpoints) and data-plane measurements (to infer relevant IP addresses) are needed, but no large-scale public infrastructure allows both. We build a novel methodology that combines BrightData (browser) and RIPE Atlas (data-plane) probes, with joint measurements from over 1,000 networks in 20 EU countries. We find that, on average, 2.2% of servers serving users in each EU country are located in non-adequate destination countries (1.4% of known trackers). Our findings suggest that data localization policies are largely being followed by content providers, though there are exceptions. 

SSH (Secure Shell) is widely used for remote access to systems and cloud services. This access comes with the persistent threat of SSH password-guessing brute-force attacks (BFAs) directed at sshd-enabled devices connected to the Internet. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of such attacks on a production facility (CloudLab), offering previously unreported insight. Our study provides a detailed analysis of SSH BFAs occurring on the Internet today through an in-depth analysis of sshd logs collected over a period of four years from over 500 servers. We report several patterns in attacker behavior, present insight on the targets of the attacks, and devise a method for tracking individual attacks over time across sources. Leveraging our insight, we develop a defense mechanism against SSH BFAs that blocks 99.5% of such attacks, significantly outperforming the 66.1% coverage of current state-of-the-art rate-based blocking while also cutting false positives by 83%. We have deployed our defense in production on CloudLab, where it catches four-fifths of SSH BFAs missed by other defense strategies.