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Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

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Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#131

Post by neom »

eCa wrote: post #120
kristianc wrote: post #95

The government official who insisted that commercial AWS/GCP/Azure couldn't possibly be trusted with keeping the information will be keeping their head low for a few days then... "The Interior Ministry explained that while most systems at the Daejeon data center are backed up daily to separate equipment within the same center and to a physically remote backup facility, the G-Drive’s structure did not allow for extern…

Agree completely that it's absolute wild to run such a system without backups. But at this point no government should keep critical data on foreign cloud storage.

Good thing Korea has cloud providers, apparently Kakao has even gone...beyond the cloud!

https://kakaocloud.com/ https://www.nhncloud.com/ https://cloud.kt.com/

To name a few.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#132

Post by lima »

miken123 wrote: post #108
kristianc wrote: post #95

The government official who insisted that commercial AWS/GCP/Azure couldn't possibly be trusted with keeping the information will be keeping their head low for a few days then... "The Interior Ministry explained that while most systems at the Daejeon data center are backed up daily to separate equipment within the same center and to a physically remote backup facility, the G-Drive’s structure did not allow for extern…

Because these companies never lose data, like during some lightning strikes, oh wait: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33989384 As a government you should not be putting your stuff in an environment under control of some other nation, period. That is a completely different issue and does not really relate to making backups.

...on a single-zone persistent disk: https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/15056#57195...

> GCE instances and Persistent Disks within a zone exist in a single Google datacenter and are therefore unavoidably vulnerable to datacenter-scale disasters.

Of course, it's perfectly possible to have proper distributed storage without using a cloud provider. It happens to be hard to implement correctly, so apparently, the SK government team in question just decided... not to?

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#135

Post by zhouzhao »

miken123 wrote: post #108
kristianc wrote: post #95

The government official who insisted that commercial AWS/GCP/Azure couldn't possibly be trusted with keeping the information will be keeping their head low for a few days then... "The Interior Ministry explained that while most systems at the Daejeon data center are backed up daily to separate equipment within the same center and to a physically remote backup facility, the G-Drive’s structure did not allow for extern…

Because these companies never lose data, like during some lightning strikes, oh wait: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33989384 As a government you should not be putting your stuff in an environment under control of some other nation, period. That is a completely different issue and does not really relate to making backups.

[flagged]

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#136

Post by Ekaros »

rvba wrote: post #119
yongjik wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse. According to other articles [1], the total data of "G drive" was 858 TB. It's almost farcical to calculate, but AWS S3 has pricing of about $0.023/GB/month, which means the South Korean government could have reliable multi-storage backup of the whole data at about $20k/month. Or about $900/month if they opted for "Glacier deep archive" tier ($0.00099/GB/month). They did have backup of the data ... in…

How does this even make sense business wise for AWS? Is their cost per unit so low?

When you start to do math, hard drive are cheap when you go for capacity and not performance.

0.00099*1000 is 0.99. So about 12$ a year. Now extrapolate something like 5 year period or 10 year period. And you get to 60 to 120$ for TB. Even at 3 to 5x redundancy those numbers start to add up.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#137

Post by Frost1x »

redwood wrote: post #117

S. Korea has the most backward infosec requirements. It's wild

Having just visited South Korea last year, one thing that sort of caught me off guard was the lack of Google Maps or other major direction system. I wasn’t aware but turns out anything considered “detailed mapping” infrastructure has to be ran stored and on South Korean soil, probably lots of other requirements. So you’re stuck with some shotty local mapping systems that are just bad.

There may be a point in time it made sense but high resolution detailed satellite imagery is plenty accessible and someone could put a road and basically planning structure atop it, especially a foreign nation wishing to invade or whatever they’re protecting against.

Some argument may be made that it would be a heavy lift for North Korea but I don’t buy it, incredibly inconvenient for tourists for no obvious reason.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#138

Post by serioussecurity »

aio2 wrote: post #52

Funny, because the same thing happened in Nepal a few weeks ago. Protestors/rioters burned some government buildings, along with the tech infrastructure within them, so now almost all electronic data is gone.

Anti authoritarian patriots?

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#139

Post by elcapitan »

Titan2189 wrote: post #130
presentation wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should have given him back his stapler

I don't get it. Can you please explain the reference?

That's an "Office Space" reference, in which a grumpy employee burns down the IT company building.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#140

Post by Muromec »

dottjt wrote: post #109
aio2 wrote: post #52

Funny, because the same thing happened in Nepal a few weeks ago. Protestors/rioters burned some government buildings, along with the tech infrastructure within them, so now almost all electronic data is gone.

Would this have been any different if these documents were stored non-electronically though? I understand that the whole point of electronic data is that it can be backed up, but if the alternative were simply an analog system then it would have fared no better.

Paper records are usually distributed both by agency and by locality.
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