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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

#721

Post by mort96 »

swarnie wrote: post #612
rasz wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AWS S3 has pricing of about $0.023/GB/month, which means ... about $20k/month or outright buying hardware capable of storing 850TB for the same $20K one time payment. Gives you some perspective on how overpriced AWS is.

Where are you getting 850TB of enterprise storage for $20k? I had 500TB of object storage priced last year and it came out closer to $300k

Priced out by whom? What kind of object storage? Were you looking at the price of drives, or the price of a complete solution delivered by some company?

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

#722

Post by robocat »

zestyping wrote: post #680
egorfine wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> This is incredible. Government telling me how to backup my data. Incredible. No more incredible than the government telling you that you need liability insurance in order to drive a car. Do you think that is justifiable?

> liability insurance in order to drive a car. Do you think that is justifiable?

New Zealand doesn't require car insurance, and I presume there are other countries with governments that that don't either.

I suspect most people in NZ would only have a sketchy idea of what liability is, based on learning from US TV shows.

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

#723

Post by raxxorraxor »

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…

Pretty sensible to not host it on these commercial services. What is not so sensible is to not make backups.

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

#724

Post by mort96 »

sixothree wrote: post #434
lucb1e wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" ?

How about "equivalent to 858 1TB hard drives"?

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

#725

Post by hobofan »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #397

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,wh…

If SK is anything similar to Germany or Japan in how they are digitizing their government processes, you'll probably be able to find paper printouts of all the data that was lost.

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

#726

Post by fer »

whartung wrote: post #100
jopsen wrote: post #68

> 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 external backups. This is why I don't really want to run my own cloud :) Actually testing the backups is boring. That said, ones the flames are out, they might actually be able to reco…

Testing backups is boring. If you want exciting, test restores!

I'm stealing this!

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

#727

Post by f1shy »

greybeard69 wrote: post #706
egorfine wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sufficiently secure and independent locations This kind of provision requires enforcement and verification. Thus, a tech spec for the backup procedure. Knowing Germany good enough, I'd say that these tech spec would be detrimental for the actual safety of the backup.

wild speculation and conjecture

Not wild.

When you live in Germany and are asked to send a FAX (and not a mail, please). Or a digital birth certificate is not accepted until you come with lawyers, or banks not willing to operate with Apple pay, just to name few..

Speculation, yes, but not at all wild

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

#728

Post by KaiserPro »

naruhodo wrote: post #425
danudey wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My mind initially went to a government cover-up, but then: > 27th of September 2025, The fire is believed to have been caused while replacing Lithium-ion batteries. The batteries were manufactured by LG, the parent company of LG Uplus (the one that got hacked by the APT). Could the battery firmware have been sabotaged by the hacker to start the fire?

It could have.

But

replacing a UPS is usually done to right time pressures. the problem is, you can rarely de-energise UPS batteries before replacing them, you just need to be really careful when you do it.

Depending on the UPS, Bus bars can be a mother fucker to get on, and of they touch energised they tend to weld together.

With lead acid, its pretty bad (think molten metal and lots of acidic, toxic and explosive gas, with lithium, its just fire. lots of fire that is really really hard to put out.

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

#729

Post by mcny »

osivertsson wrote: post #700
hnlmorg wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WTC attacks were in the 90s and early 00s and back then, 50 miles of latency was anything but negligible and Azure didn’t exist. I know this because I was working on online systems back then. I also vividly remember 9/11 and the days that followed. We had a satellite dish with multiple receivers (which wasn’t common back then) so had to run a 3rd party Linux box to descramble the single. We watch 24/7 global news…

Laws of physics hasn't changed since the early 00s though, we could build very low latency point to point links back then too.

Yes but good luck trying to get funding approval. There is a funny saying that wealthy people don't become wealthy by giving their wealth away. I think it applies to companies even more.

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

#730

Post by raxxorraxor »

acchow wrote: post #536
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.

> The issue here is not refusing to use a foreign third party. That makes sense. Encrypt before sending to a third party?

Why make yourself dependent on a foreign country for your own sensitive data?

You have to integrate the special software requirements to any cloud storage anyway and hosting a large amount of files isn't an insurmountable technical problem.

If you can provide the minimal requirements like backups, of course.

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