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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

#441

Post by Loudergood »

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…

You're not designing to protect from data loss, you're designing to protect from downtime.

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

#442

Post by croes »

xoa wrote: post #329
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?

> 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…

You don’t need a backdoor in the encryption if you can backdoor the devices as such.

Crypto AG anyone?

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

#443

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

Encryption is the mechanism of segmentation for most everything on 2025.

AES is secure for the foreseeable future. Failures in key storage and exchange, and operational failures are the actual threat and routinely present a practical, exploitable problem.

You see it in real life as well. What’s the most common way of stealing property from a car? A: Open the unlocked door.

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

#444

Post by solarengineer »

skissane wrote: post #419
throwaway2037 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> South Korean corporate management is stuffed full of ex-military officers For those unaware, all "able-bodied" South Korean men are required to do about two years of military service. This sentence doesn't do much for me. Also, please remember that Germany also had required military service until quite recently. That means anyone "old" (over 40) and doing corp mgmt was probably also a military officer.

The way it was explained to me was different... yes, all able-bodied males do national service. But there's a different phenomenon in which someone serves some years active duty (so this is not their mandatory national service, this is voluntary active duty service), in some relatively prestigious position, and then jumps ship to the corporate world, and they get hired as an executive by their ex-comrades/ex-superior…

Did you happen to notice interesting phenomenon like “the role becomes a rank”?

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

#445

Post by highwind »

_heimdall wrote: post #432
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…

> 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.

I've done my fair share of translating as a bilingual person and having an LLM to do a first pass at translation saves TON of time. I don't "need" LLM, but it's definitely a helpful tool.

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

#446

Post by spacechild1 »

_heimdall wrote: post #432
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 reporter does not need the LLM, but it's often faster to review/edit a machine translation than doing the whole translation by yourself

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

#447

Post by positron26 »

danudey wrote: post #399
jftr wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

UPS, check. Any kind of reasonable fire extinguisher, nah.

A Kakao datacenter fire took the de-facto national chat app offline not too many years ago. Imagine operating a service that was nearly ubiquitous in the state of California and not being able to survive one datacenter outage.

After reading the Phrack article, I don't know what to suspect, the typical IT disaster preparedness or the operators turning off the fire suppression main and ordering anyone in the room to evacuate to give a little UPS fire enough time to start going cabinet to cabinet.

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

#448

Post by saghm »

beefnugs wrote: post #427
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…

So just a blanket message at the bottom of the page "anything and everyone you read here might be total bullshit"

FWIW that happens sometimes with traditional reporting to. At the end of the day, it's just a matter of degree, and to be truly informed you need to need to be willing to question the accuracy of your sources. As the parent comment said, at least they're being transparent, which isn't even always the case for traditional reporting

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

#450

Post by positron26 »

ruined wrote: post #414
jftr wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

look at the timeline again. this is the second fire.

technically seems more accurate to say controlled burn
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