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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

#391

Post by Dylan16807 »

jacquesm wrote: post #347
xoa wrote: post #337

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. Permanently losing data at a given store point isn't relevant to losing data overall. Data store failures are assumed or else there'd be no point in backups. What matters is whether failures in multiple points happen at the same time , which means a…

> Permanently losing data at a given store point isn't relevant to losing data overall. I can't reveal any details but it was a lot more than just a given storage point. The interesting thing is that there were multiple points along the way where the damage would have been recoverable but their absolute incompetence made matters much worse to the point where there were no options left. > FWIW there's no "simply" abou…

In this context the entirety of IBM cloud is basically a single storage point.

(If IBM was also running the local storage then we're talking about a very different risk profile from "run your own storage, back up to a cloud" and the anecdote is worth noting but not directly relevant.)

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

#392

Post by BlueTemplar »

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…

It's still worse than useless :

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-killed-my-job-transla...

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

#393

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

logicchains wrote: post #116
MangoCoffee wrote: post #76

It's hard to believe this happened. South Korea has tech giants like Samsung, and yet this is how the government runs? Is the US government any better?

Samsung's software is generally terrible; they're decent at hardware, not software.

I was going to say, Samsung anything immediately makes me assume the software is awful. With a dose of zero privacy, cloud enabled door-knob or something.

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

#394

Post by throwaway2037 »

shantara wrote: post #276
deaddodo wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of gray relations out there, but there’s almost no way you could morph the current US/SK relations to one of hostility; beyond a negligible minority of citizens in either being super vocal for some perceived slights.

A year ago, I would have easily claimed the same thing about Denmark.

I don't follow. Can you share more context?

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

#395

Post by Marsymars »

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…

This is how I’ve done translation for a number of years, even pre-LLM, between the languages I speak natively - machine translation is good enough that it’s faster for me to fix its problems than for me to do it from scratch.

(Whether machine translation uses LLMs or not doesn’t seem especially relevant to the workflow.)

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

#396

Post by almostgotcaught »

100721 wrote: post #360
xoa wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using encryption, which is known to have backdoors and is vulnerable to nation state cracking? WTF are you talking about? There are absolutely zero backdoors of any kind known to be in any standard open source encryption systems, and symmetric cryptography 256-bits or more is not subject to cracking by anyone or anything, not even if general purpose quantum computers are doable and prove scalable. Shor's algorithm…

As someone who’s fairly tech-literate but has a big blind spot in cryptography, I’d love to hear any suggestions you have for articles, blog posts, or smaller books on the topic! My (rudimentary, layman) understanding is that encryption is almost like a last line of defense and should never be assumed to be unbreakable. You sound both very knowledgeable on the topic, and very confident in the safety of modern encrypt…

> My (rudimentary, layman) understanding is that encryption is almost like a last line of defense and should never be assumed to be unbreakable

Lol this is woefully misinformed.

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

#397

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

While I am sure a huge portion of valuable work will be lost, I am smirking thinking of management making a call, "So, if there is any shadow IT who has been running mirror databases of valuable infrastructure, we would have a no questions asked policy on sharing that right now".

I know that I have had to keep informal copies of valuable systems because the real source of truth is continually patched,offline,churn,whatever.

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

#398

Post by postsantum »

msbhvn wrote: post #122
jn78 wrote: post #80

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

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.

"NK hackers" reminds me "my homework was eaten by a dog". It's always NK hackers that steal data/crypto and there is absolutely no possibility to do something with it or restore the data, because you know they transfer the info on a hard disk and they shoot it with an AD! Like that general!

How do we know it's NK? Because there are comments in north-korean language, duh! Why are you asking, are you russian bot or smt??

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

#399

Post by danudey »

jftr wrote: post #358
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.

Phrack's timeline may read like it, but it wasn't an onsite inspection due to hacking, but a scheduled maintenance to replace the overdue UPS, hence battery-touching involved. Even the image they linked just says "scheduled maintenance."

So right after the investigation was announced, they suddenly scheduled a UPS battery replacement which happened to start a fire big enough to destroy the entire data centre and all data or evidence?

Yeah, that's way less suspicious, thanks for clearing that up.

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

#400

Post by raingrove »

makeitdouble wrote: post #348
covercash wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"suicide" in these circumstances is usually something else altogether. Even in cases it is executed by themselves, shame won't be the primary motivation.

In Korea, shame often serves as the primary motivator behind high-profile suicides. It's rooted in the cultural concept of "chemyeon (체면)", which imposes immense pressure to maintain a dignified public image.
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