Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available • Hacker News Board

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

#651

Post by franga2000 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 7:16 AM UTC

waterTanuki wrote: post #503

kristianc wrote: post #95

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…

I understand data sovereignty in the case where a foreign entity might cut off access to your data, but this paranoia that storing info under your bed is the safest bet is straight up false. We have post-quantum encryption widely available already. If your fear is that a foreign entity will access your data, you're technologically illiterate. Obviously no person in a lawmaking position will ever have the patience or…

Encryption only makes sense if "the cloud" is just a data storage bucket to you. If you run applications in the cloud, you can't have all the data encrypted, especially not all the time. There are some technologies that make this possible, but none are mature enough to run even a small business, let alone a country on.

It sounds technologically illiterate to you because when people say "we can't safely use a foreign cloud" you think they're saying "to store data" and everyone else is thinking at the very least "to store and process data".

Sure, they could have used a cloud provider for encrypted backups, but if they knew how to do proper backups, they wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.

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

#652

Post by egorfine » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 7:18 AM UTC

zwnow wrote: post #649

thanatos519 wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backups should be far away, too. Apparently some companies lost everything on 9/11 because their backups were in the other tower.

Funnily enough, Germany has laws for where you are allowed to store backups exactly due to these kinda issues. Fire, flood, earthquake, tornadoes, whatever you name, backups need to be stored with appropriate security in mind.

Germany, of course. Like my company needs government permission to store backups.

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

#653

Post by ken47 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 7:28 AM UTC

Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.

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

#654

Post by tooltalk » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 7:29 AM UTC

thanatos519 wrote: post #626

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.

Backups should be far away, too. Apparently some companies lost everything on 9/11 because their backups were in the other tower.

Some foolishly believed that the twin towers were invincible after the 1993 WTC bombing.

Before 9/11, most DR (disaster recovery) sites were in Jersey City, NJ just across the river from their main offices in WFC or WTC, or roughly 3-5 miles away. After 9/11, the financial industry adopted a 50+ miles rule.

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

#655

Post by admiralrohan » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 7:30 AM UTC

Is there any solution to these kind of issues other than having multiple backups and praying that not all of them will caught fire at the same time?

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

#656

Post by yard2010 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 7:31 AM UTC

jeena wrote: post #499

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 difference is that South Korea is currently technically still at war with North Korea.

This - you and half of the smart people here in the comments clearly have no idea what it's like to live across the border from a country that wants you eradicated.

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

#657

Post by sph » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 7:31 AM UTC

pico303 wrote: post #150

kristianc wrote: post #95

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…

What a lame excuse. “The G-Drive’s structure did not allow for backups” is a blatant lie. It’s code for, “I don’t value other employees’ time and efforts enough to figure out a reliable backup system; I have better things to do.” Whoever made this excuse should be demoted to a journeyman ops engineer. Firing would be too good for them.

Silly to think this is the fault of ops engineers. More likely, the project manager or C-suite didn't have time nor budget to allocate on disaster recovery.

The project shipped, it's done, they've already moved us onto the next task, no one wants to pay for maintenance anyway.

This has been my experience in 99% of the companies I have worked for in my career, while the engineers that built the bloody thing groan and are well-aware of all the failure modes of the system they've built. No one cares, until it breaks, and hopefully they get the chance to say "I **** told you this was inadequate"

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

#658

Post by leipert » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 7:32 AM UTC

egorfine wrote: post #652

zwnow wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, Germany has laws for where you are allowed to store backups exactly due to these kinda issues. Fire, flood, earthquake, tornadoes, whatever you name, backups need to be stored with appropriate security in mind.

Germany, of course. Like my company needs government permission to store backups.

More like: your company (or government agency) is critical infrastructure or of a certain size, so there are obligations on how you maintain your records. It’s not like the US or other countries don’t have similar requirements.

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

#659

Post by gkanai » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 7:33 AM UTC

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…

Back when I worked for Mozilla, I had the chance to go to Seoul to meet with various companies and some governmental ministries. This was when Korean banks and ecommerce sites required Internet Explorer and Active-X controls for secure transactions. This meant that MacOS users or Linux users couldnt do secure transactions in Korea without emulating Win/IE.

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

#660

Post by rstuart4133 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 7:33 AM UTC

yetihehe wrote: post #623

jeroenhd wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you'd encrypt the data before uploading it to a third party, but there's no reason why that third party should be under control of a foreign government. South Korea has more than one data center they can store data inside of, there's no need to trust other governments sigh every byte of data you've gathered, even if there are no known backdoors or flaws in your encryption mechanism (which I'm sure some gove…

There is a reason that NIST recommends new encryption algorithms from time to time. If you get a copy of ALL government data, in 20 years you might be able to break encryption and get access to ALL government data from 20yr ago, no matter how classified they were, if they were stored in that cloud. Such data might still be valuable, because not all data is published after some period.

That doesn't sound like a good excuse to me.

aes128 has been the formal standard for 23 years. The only "foreseeable" event that could challenge it is quantum computing. The likely post quantum replacement is ... aes256, which is already a NIST standard. NIST won't replace aes256 in the foreseeable future.

All that aside, there is no shortage of ciphers. If you are worried about one being broken, chain a few of them together.

And finally, no secret has to last forever. Western governments tend to declassify just about everything after 50 years. After 100 everyone involved is well and truly dead.