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

Post by littlestymaar » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 6:43 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #881

littlestymaar wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well first of all neither you and I knows the decryption capabilities of the NSA, all we know is that they have hired more cryptologists than the rest of the world combined. Also, it's much easier for an intelligence service to get the hand on a 1kB encryption key than on a PB of data: the former is much easier to exfiltrate without being noticed. And then I don't know why you bring encryption here: pretty much none…

1. More evidence suggests that NSA does not know how to decrypt state-of-the-art ciphers than suggests they do. If they did know, it's far less likely we'd have nation states trying to force Apple and others to provide backdoors for decryption of suspects' personal devices. (Also, as a general rule, I don't put too much stock in the notion that governments are far more competent than the private sector. They're made…

Post by SEJeff » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 6:58 PM UTC

xp84 wrote: post #910

SEJeff wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So that's 5 million bucks for 50 miles? If there are other costs not being accounted for, like paying for the right-of-way that's one thing, but I would think big companies or in this case, a national government, could afford that bill.

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 6:59 PM UTC

Chris2048 wrote: post #873

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll also bet the internal audit team slides out of this completely unscathed. They really, really shouldn't. However, if they were shouted down by management (an unfortunately common experience) then it's on management. The trouble is that you can either be effective at internal audit or popular, and lots of CAE's choose the wrong option (but then, people like having jobs so I dunno).

Which begs the question, Does N Korea have governmental whistle-blower laws and/or services? Also, internal audit aren't supposed to be the only audit, they are effectively pre-audit prep for external audit. And the first thing an external auditor should do - ask them probing questions about their systems and process.

Post by alluro2 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 7:13 PM UTC

arcfour wrote: post #906

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.

I very seriously doubt that the US cares about South Korea's deepest, darkest secrets that much, if at all. Not using a cloud provider is asinine. You can use layered encryption so the expected lifetime of the cryptography is beyond the value of the data...and the US government themselves store data on all 3 of them, to my knowledge. I say US because the only other major cloud providers I know of are in China, and th…

Post by SEJeff » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 7:25 PM UTC

namibj wrote: post #814

lambdaone wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DWDM per-wavelength costs are way, way lower than that, and, with the optional addition of encryption, perfectly secure and fast enough for disk replication for most storage farms. I've been there and done it.

Assuming that dark fiber is actually dark (without amplifiers/repeaters), I'd wonder how they'd justify the 4 orders of magnitude (99.99%!) profit margin on said fiber. That already includes one order of magnitude between the 12th-of-a-ribbon clad-fiber and opportunistically (when someone already digs the ground up) buried speed pipe with 144-core cable.