Live data from Hacker News

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

koreajoongangdaily.joins.com

311–320 of 987 posts

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

#311
post #120

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.

If you can’t encrypt your backups such that you could store them tatooed on Putin’s ass, you need to learn about backups more.

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

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ed25519 (and ec25519) are generally understood not to be backdoored by the NSA, or weak in any known sense. The lack of a backdoor can be proven by choosing parameters according to straightforward reasons that do not allow the possibility for the chooser to insert a backdoor. The curve25519 parameters have good reasons why they are chosen. By contrast, Dual_EC_DRBG contains two random-looking numbers, which the NSA p…

> but nobody's been able to break it, either. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It could well be that someone has been able to break it but that they or that organization did not publish.

How could you not!? Think of the bragging rights. Or, perhaps the havoc. That persons could sit on this secret for long periods of time seem... difficult to maintain. If you know it's broken and you've discovered it; surely someone else could too. And they've also kept the secret?

I agree on the evidence/absence of conjecture. However, the impact of the secret feels impossible to keep.

Time will, of course, tell; it wouldn't be the first occasion where that has embarrassed me.

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

#313
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

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

#314
I must say, at least for me personally when I hear about such levels of incompetence it rings alarm bells in my head making me think that maybe intentional malice was involved. Like someone higher up had set up the whole thing to happen in such a matter because there was a benefit to this happening we are unaware of. I think this belief maybe stems from lack of imagination on how really stupid humans can get.

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

#316
post #208

I would love to know how a fire of this magnitude could happen in a modern data center.

Often poor planning or just lithium based batteries far too close to the physical servers.

OVH's massive fire a couple of years ago in one of the most modern DC's at the time was a prime example of just how wrong it can go.

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of a big cloud services provider (I won't name any names but it was IBM) that lost a fairly large amount of data. Permanently. So that too isn't a guarantee. They simply should have made local and off-line backups, that's the gold standard, and to ensure that those backups are complete and can be used to restore from scratch to a complete working service.

DigitalOcean lost some of my files in their object storage too: https://status.digitalocean.com/incidents/tmnyhddpkyvf Using a commercial provider is not a guarantee.

DO Spaces, for at least a year after launch, had no durability guarantees whatsoever. Perhaps they do now, but I wouldn’t compare DO in any meaningful way to S3, which has crazy high durability guarantees as well as competent engineering effort expended on designing and validating that durability.

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

#318
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Samsung owns Joyent

Nevertheless isn't Joyent registered in the US?

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

#319
post #80

https://phrack.org/issues/72/7_md#article

> 27th of September 2025, The fire is believed to have been caused while replacing Lithium-ion batteries. The batteries were manufactured by LG, the parent company of LG Uplus (the one that got hacked by the APT).

Compromised batteries or battery controllers?

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

#320
post #136
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.
Post reply on HN