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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

#581

Post by catlifeonmars »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #339
eCa wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don’t need cloud when you have the data centre, just backups in physical locations somewhere else

Others have pointed out: you need uptime too. So a single data center on the same electric grid or geographic fault zone wouldn’t really cut it. This is one of those times where it sucks to be a small country (geographically).

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

#582

Post by jeroenhd »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #566

Is it just me, or is this a massively better result than "1PB of government documents containing sensitive data about private individuals was exfiltrated to a hacker group and found for sale"? I applaud them for honouring their obligation to keep such data private. And encourage them to work on their backup procedures while continuing to honour that obligation.

A sibling comment links to a phrack page (https://phrack.org/issues/72/7_md) about North Korean infiltration in South Korean systems. The timing on that page and the fire make for a possible, though in my opinion wildly unlikely, scenario where either a saboteur started the fire when investigations were supposed to start, or (if you like hacking movies) that a UPS battery was rigged to cause a fire by the spies inside of the South Korean systems.

It's possible that this is all just a coincidence, but the possibility that North Korea is trying to cover their tracks is there.

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

#583

Post by conductr »

mattmaroon wrote: post #401
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

> 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.

LG is SK firm and manufacturer of hacked hardware and also the batteries that caught fire. Not sure it’s a solid theory just something I took note of while thinking the same

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

#584

Post by sbinnee »

v7engine wrote: post #556
sbinnee wrote: post #555

What a sad news as a Korean to see a post about Korea at the top of HN during one of the largest Korean holiday. I can share an anecdote how slow tech adoption is in Korea. It is not exactly about tech in public section but in private companies. I assume public section has slower adoption rate than private ones in general. Just about a year ago I had a couple of projects with insurance companies. I won't name them bu…

Do South Korean companies prefer hosting data on their own servers instead of using Public cloud providers like Azure, AWS, GCP?

Yes and no. They used to prefer everything on premise. Many try to move towards cloud especially newer companies. Major cloud providers you mentioned are not the usual choices though (maybe aws is the most common). They do have data centers in Seoul and try to expand their markets for South Korea. But government offers generous incentives for using domestic cloud providers like NHN which was mentioned in the article or Naver cloud. Why does this work? Because Korean services rarely target global markets mainly due to language barrier. Domestic cloud usage is sufficient enough.

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

#585

Post by lloeki »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #553
bane wrote: post #491

Goodness, I have over 100TB at home and it cost less than a two or three thousand dollars to put in place. That's like $25 per TB. > The stored data amounts to 858TB (terabytes), equivalent to 449.5 billion A4 sheets. No, the 858TB amounts to under $25k for the government of the 10th largest economy, of one of the most sophisticated countries on the planet, to put in place. Two of those would be less than the price o…

~1PB of data, with ingestion at a rate of 12GB per hour, is a tiny amount of data to manage and backup properly for a developed world government. This is silly. Volume clearly should not have been a hinderance. Backup operations are often complex and difficult - but then again it's been worked on for decades and rigorous protocols exist which can and should be adopted. "However, due to the system’s large-capacity, lo…

> Backup operations are often complex and difficult

It quickly becomes much less so if you satisfy yourself with very crude methods.

Sure that would be an imperfect backup in many ways but any imperfect backup is always infinitely better than no backup at all.

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

#586

Post by southernplaces7 »

roncesvalles wrote: post #436
zaran wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 printe…

This is a nation state in a state of perpetual tension, formal war and persistent attempts at sabotage by a notoriously paranoid and unscrupulous next-door enemy totalitarian/crime family state.

SK should have no shortage of motive or much trouble (it's an extremely wealthy country with a very well-funded, sophisticated government apparatus) implementing its own version of hardcore data security for backups.

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

#587

Post by srj »

bradly wrote: post #467
rr808 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some data privacy requirement in SK where application servers and data have to remain in the country. I worked for a big global bank and we had 4 main instances of our application: Americas, EMEA, Asia and South Korea.

When I worked on Apple Maps infra South Korea required all servers be in South Korea.

It was the same at google. If I'm remembering right we couldn't export any vector type data (raster only) and the tiles themselves had to be served out of South Korea.

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

#588

Post by joshvm »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #567
WalterBright wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy a 24Tb drive on sale for $240 or so. Sometimes I wonder why I still try and save disk space :-/

Link? Am both curious and skeptical

Seagate Expansion drives are in this price range and can be shucked. They're not enterprise drives meant for constant operation, the big ones are Barracudas or maybe Exos, but for homelab NAS they're very popular.

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

#590

Post by luispauloml »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #521
luispauloml wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So you’re stuck with some shotty local mapping systems that are just bad. What made you think of them as bad? Could you be more specific? I use them almost daily and I find them very good.

They lack a lot of polish. Functionally they're mostly usable, but some interactions are janky and I found the search to be super hit or miss.

> I found the search to be super hit or miss.

I heard similar complaints from friends that came to visit. But they were using the English version of the apps, which, when I tested, were indeed harder to use, but never a miss for me when I helped them. OTOH, I always find my destinations within the first three options when I search in Korean. So maybe it's subpar internationlization.

> They lack a lot of polish. [...] some interactions are janky

I see. I guess I wouldn't know. It's not janky for me, and I think that I am so used to it that when I need to use Google Maps, or any other, I feel a bit frustrated by the unfamiliar interface that I start wishing I could be using Kakao or Naver Maps instead.

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