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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

#431

Post by davkan »

belorn wrote: post #404
VirusNewbie wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 e…

Many organizations are willing to accept the fallbacks of cloud backup storage because it’s the tertiary backup in the event of physical catastrophe. In my experience those tertiary backups are there to prevent the total loss of company IP in the should an entire site be lost. If you only have one office and it burns down work will be severely impacted anyway.

Obviously the calculus changes with maximally critical systems where lives are lost if the systems are down or you are losing millions per hour of downtime.

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

#432

Post by _heimdall »

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…

That footnote does make me question the bilingual reporter's skills in both languages though. If the reporter needs an LLM to help translate they could easily be missing subtle mistranslations.

The final note that all AI-assisted translations are reviewed by the newsroom is also interesting. If they are going to take the time to review it and have enough experience in both languages to verify the translation, why use the LLM for it at all?

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

#433

Post by LorenPechtel »

efitz wrote: post #406

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 r…

Yeah. I've seen it. Had one very close call. The thieves took an awful lot of stuff, including the backups, had they taken the next box off the server room rack the company would have been destroyed. They stole one of our trucks (which probably means it was an inside job) and appear to have worked their way through the building, becoming more selective as they progressed. We are guessing they filled the truck and left.

Did anything change? No.

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

#434

Post by sixothree »

lucb1e wrote: post #341
layer8 wrote: post #62

Some more details in this article: https://www.chosun.com/english/national-en/2025/10/02/FPWGFS...

> The stored data amounts to 858TB (terabytes), equivalent to 449.5 billion A4 sheets. This attempt at putting it in perspective makes me wonder what would put it in perspective. "100M sets of harry potter novels" would be one step in the right direction, but nobody can imagine 100M of anything either. Something like "a million movies" wouldn't work because they are very different from text media in terms of how much…

"equivalent to 50 hard drives" ?

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

#436

Post by roncesvalles »

zaran wrote: post #407
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?

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

It's not so much that there is a way to directly crack an encrypted file as much as there being backdoors in the entire HW and SW chain of you decrypting and accessing the encrypted file.

Short of you copying an encrypted file from the server onto a local trusted Linux distro (with no Intel ME on the machine), airgapping yourself, entering the decryption passphrase from a piece of paper (written by hand, never printed), with no cameras in the room, accessing what you need, and then securely wiping the machine without un-airgapping, you will most likely be tripping through several CIA-backdoored things.

Basically, the extreme level of digital OPSEC maintained by OBL is probably the bare minimum if your adversary is the state machinery of the United States or China.

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

#437

Post by croes »

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]

That’s why

Microsoft can't guarantee data sovereignty

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45061153

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

#438

Post by solarengineer »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #396
100721 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

It is my understanding that current encrypted content can someday be decrypted.

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

#439

Post by croes »

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 are less public options to get the data without breaking encryption especially when the target uses MS software

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

#440

Post by afthonos »

jacquesm wrote: post #269
immibis wrote: post #258

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.

It is, actually. A correct statement would be “absence of proof is not proof of absence”, but “evidence” and “proof” are not synonyms.
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