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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

#731

Post by lordnacho »

pammf wrote: post #604

Real reason is humans are way too optimistic in planning and, for some reason, tend to overlook even more rare, but catastrophic risks. I’m almost sure that the system had some sort of local replication and versioning that was enough to deal with occasional deletions, rollbacks, and single non-widespread hardware failures, so only the very catastrophic scenario of losing all servers at the same time (that for sure wo…

But it's extra surprising, because South Korea is a country where every young man is conscripted due to the threat of war with the north. If the conflict is serious enough for that, why hasn't someone thought about losing all the government data in a single artillery strike?

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

#732

Post by koakuma-chan »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #569
tamimio wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Estonia follows the “once-only” principle: citizens provide their data just once, and government agencies re-use it securely. The next step is proactive services—where the government initiates service delivery based on existing data, without waiting for a citizen’s request. I wish the same concept was in Canada as well. You absolutely have to resubmit all your information every time you do a request. On top of that…

I wanted to update some paperwork to add my wife as a beneficiary to some accounts. I go to the bank in person and they tell me “call this number, they can add the beneficiary”. I call the number and wait on hold for 30 minutes and then the agent tells me that they will send me an email to update the beneficiary. I get an email over 24 hours later with a PDF THAT I HAVE TO PRINT OUT AND SIGN and then scan and send ba…

I used my bank as an Sign In partner for IRCC, and I lost my IRCC account after my debit card expired and I got a new one.

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

#733

Post by cm2187 »

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.

Plus long distance was mostly fibre already. And even regular electrical wires aren’t really much slower than fibre in term of latency. Parent probably meant bandwidth.

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

#734

Post by immibis »

Avamander wrote: post #268
9dev wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re assuming we don’t get better at building faster computers and decryption techniques. If an adversary gets hold of your encrypted data now, they can just shelf it until cracking becomes eventually possible in a few decades. And as we’re talking about literal state secrets here, they may very well still be valuable by then.

You make an incorrect assumption about my assumptions. Faster computers or decryption techniques will never fundamentally "break" symmetric encryption. There's no discrete logarithm or factorization problem to speed up. Someone might find ways to make for example AES key recovery somewhat faster, but the margin of safety in those cases is still incredibly vast. In the end there's such an unfathomably vast key space t…

You're also assuming nobody finds a fundamental flaw in AES that allows data to be decrypted without knowing the key and much faster than brute force. It's pretty likely there isn't one, but a tiny probability multiplied by a massive impact can still land on the side of "don't do it".

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

#735

Post by cm2187 »

chatmasta wrote: post #452
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.

Nothing increases the risk of servers catching fire like government investigators showing up to investigate allegations that North Korea hacked the servers.

Or investigations into a major financial scandal in a large French bank!

(While the Credit Lyonnais was investigated in the 90s, both the HQ and the site where they stored their archives were destroyed by fire within a few months)

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

#736

Post by phatfish »

"The stored data amounts to 858TB (terabytes), equivalent to 449.5 billion A4 sheets"

Just so we can all visualise this in an understandable way, if laid end-to-end how many times round the world would the A4 sheets go?

And what is their total area in football fields?

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

#737

Post by SEJeff »

flumpcakes wrote: post #673
AdamN wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jersey City still was fine and 50 miles can be problematic for certain types of backup (failover) protocols. Regular tape backups would be fine but secondary databases can't be that far away (at least not at the time). I remember my boss at WFC saying that the most traffic over the data lines was in the middle of the night due to backups - not when everybody was in the office.

Companies big enough will lay the fibre. 50-100 miles of fibre isn't much if you are a billion dollar business. Even companies like BlackRock who had their own datacenters have since taken up Azure. 50 miles latency is negligible, even for databases.

In the US, dark fiber will run you around 100k / mile. Thats expensive for anyone even if they can afford it. I worked in HFT for 15 years and we had tons of it.

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

#738

Post by hnlmorg »

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.

Switching gear was slower and laying new fibre wasn't an option for your average company. Particularly not point-to-point between your DB server and your replica.

So if real-time synchronization isn't practical, you are then left to do out-of-hours backups and there you start running into bandwidth issues of the time.

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

#739

Post by akpa1 »

phatfish wrote: post #736

"The stored data amounts to 858TB (terabytes), equivalent to 449.5 billion A4 sheets" Just so we can all visualise this in an understandable way, if laid end-to-end how many times round the world would the A4 sheets go? And what is their total area in football fields?

190,813,414 and a bit times round the equator if you place them long edge to long edge

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

#740

Post by dikei »

dottjt wrote: post #109
aio2 wrote: post #52

Funny, because the same thing happened in Nepal a few weeks ago. Protestors/rioters burned some government buildings, along with the tech infrastructure within them, so now almost all electronic data is gone.

Would this have been any different if these documents were stored non-electronically though? I understand that the whole point of electronic data is that it can be backed up, but if the alternative were simply an analog system then it would have fared no better.

For paper documents, you'd make at least a few copies for storage at the source, and then every receiver will get his/her own notarized copies.

Electronically, everyone just receives a link to read the document.

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