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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

#401

Post by mattmaroon »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #306
msbhvn wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah, read the timeline at the top of this. The fire happened the very day the government ordered onsite inspection was supposed to start due to Chinese/NK hacking.

Yeah, this whole thing smells. Who has the incentive to do this, though? China/North Korea? Or someone in South Korea trying to cover up how bad they messed up? Does adding this additional mess on top mean they looked like they messed up less ? (And for that to be true, how horrifically bad does the hack have to be?)

It might be different “they”s. Putting on my tinfoil hat, whoever was going to be in hot water over the hack burns it down and now the blame shifts from them to whoever manages G-drive and don’t have a backup plan.

Not saying I believe this (or even know enough to have an opinion), but it’s always important to not anthropomorphize a large organization. The government isn’t one person (even in totalitarian societies) but an organization that contains large numbers of people who may all have their own motivations.

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

#402

Post by lofaszvanitt »

vbezhenar wrote: post #313
lukevp wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How’s that? Using encryption, which is known to have backdoors and is vulnerable to nation state cracking?

It is much more likely and cheaper, that US marines will desant and capture your backup facility, than someone would break AES-128.

There might be unknown unknowns....

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

#403

Post by sgammon »

> There is a cert and private key for rc.kt.co.kr, South Korea Telecom's Remote Control Service. It runs remote support backend from https://www.rsupport.com. Kim may have access to any company that Korea Telecom was providing remote support for.

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

#404

Post by belorn »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #300
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue here is not refusing to use a foreign third party. That makes sense. The issue is mandating the use of remote storage and not backing it up. That’s insane. It’s like the most basic amount of preparation you do. It’s recommended to even the smallest of companies specifically because a fire is a risk. That’s gross mismanagement.

[flagged]

As a sysadmin at company that provide fairly sensitive services, I find online cloud backups to be way to slow for the purpose of protecting against something like the server room being destroyed by a fire. Even something like spinning disks at a remote location feel like a risk, as files would need to be copied onto faster disks before services could be restored, and that copying would take precious time during an emergency. When downtime means massive losses of revenue for customers, being down for hours or even days while waiting for the download to finish is not going be accepted.

Restoring from cloud backups is one of those war stories that I occasionally hear, including the occasionally fedex solution of sending the backup disk by carrier.

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

#405

Post by AnotherGoodName »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #372

At the very bottom of the article, I see this notice: > This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom. I like that. It is direct and honest. I'm fine with people using LLMs for natural language related work, as long a…

Especially since LLM tech was originally developed for translation. That’s the original reason so much work was done to create a model that could handle context and it turned out that was helpful in more areas than just translation.

While LLM usage is just spinning up in other areas, for translation they have been doing this job well for over 5 years now.

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

#406

Post by efitz »

The lack of backups makes my blood boil. However, from my own experience, I want to know more before I assign blame.

The very first "computer guy" job I had starting in about 1990/1991, my mentor gave me a piece of advice that I remember to this day: "Your job is to make sure the backups are working; everything else is gravy."

While I worked in that job, we outgrew the tape backup system we were using, so I started replicating critical data between our two sites (using 14400 bps Shiva NetModems), and every month I'd write a memo requesting a working backup system and explaining the situation. Business was too cheap to buy it.

We had a hard drive failure on one of our servers, I requested permission to invalidate the drive's warranty because I was pretty sure it was a bad bearing; I got it working for a few weeks by opening the case and spinning the platter with my finger to get it started. I made sure a manager was present so that they could understand how wack the situation was- they bought me a new drive but not the extras that I asked for, in order to mirror.

After I left that job, a friend of mine called me a month later and told me that they had a server failure and were trying to blame the lack of backups on me; fortunately my successor found my stack of memos.

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

#407

Post by zaran »

lukevp wrote: post #310
VirusNewbie wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How’s that? Using encryption, which is known to have backdoors and is vulnerable to nation state cracking?

Can you provide an example of a commonly used cryptography system that is known to be vulnerable to nation state cracking?

As for backdoors, they may exist if you rely on a third party but it's pretty hard to backdoor the relatively simple algorithms used in cryptography

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

#408

Post by makeitdouble »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #371
makeitdouble wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming a level of competency that's hard to warrant at this point.

If your threat model is this high that you assume encryption breaking to be into your threat model, then maybe you do need a level of comeptency in the process as well. They have 2 Trillion $ economy. I am sure that competency shouldn't be the thing that they should be worrying at that scale but at the same time I know those 2 trillion $ don't really make them more competent but I just want to share that it was very…

I think it doesn't need to be the encryption breaking per se.

It could be a gov laptop with the encryption keys left at a bar. Or the wrong keys saved on the system and the backups can't actually be decrypted. Or the keys being reused at large scale and leaked/guessed from lower security area. etc.

Relying on encryption requires operation knowledge and discipline. At some point, a base level of competency is required anyway, I'm not just sure encryption would have saved them as much as we'd wish it would.

To your point, I'd assume high profile incidents like this one will put more pressure to do radical changes, and in particular to treat digital data as a more critical asset that you can't hand down to the crookest corrupt entity willy nilly just for the kickback.

South Korea doesn't lack competent people, but hiring them and letting them at the helm sounds like a tough task.

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

#409

Post by hapanin »

vbezhenar wrote: post #320
Ekaros wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

S3 does not spend 3x drives to provide redundancy. Probably 20% more drives or something like that. They split data to chunks and use erasure coding to store them in multiple drives with little overhead.

wait, can you elaborate on how this works?

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

#410

Post by godelski »

covercash wrote: post #302
gtirloni wrote: post #126

wow https://x.com/koryodynasty/status/1973956091638890499 > A senior government official overseeing recovery efforts for South Korea's national network crisis has reportedly died by suicide in Sejong.

If the US government and corporate executives had even half this level of shame, we'd have nobody left in those positions!

You should look at the previous president of SK. Maybe a few more too... they frequently land in jail...

I'm not sure Yoon Suk Yeol had any shame

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Yoon_Suk_Yeol

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