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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

#921

Post by TulliusCicero »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #787
flakeoil wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and US bad at everything else.

The US economy is one of the world's most diverse in terms of exports: https://oec.world/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/usa/all/... Side note: Why is there so much fact-free anti-US sentiment on HN?

> Side note: Why is there so much fact-free anti-US sentiment on HN?

Look at basically any domain: whoever's in the lead, gets the most hate.

The US has the world's biggest economy and military, the most cultural power, the biggest tech industry, etc. The hate is inevitable. That's not to say that the US doesn't have plenty of very real problems -- obviously it does -- but it's just easier to dunk on the leader, which also means more empty, vacuous criticism.

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

#922

Post by TulliusCicero »

flakeoil wrote: post #767
trivo wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems everyone ouside of US is bad at producing software.

Yes, and US bad at everything else.

The US has super successful music and movie industries, puts out a lot of fossil fuels, hugely successful finance sector, and has the world's most powerful military. Really, the US has plenty of strengths to go along with its weaknesses.

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

#923

Post by TulliusCicero »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #640
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…

Things South Korea is good at producing: Cars, ships, steel, semiconductors, electronics, medicines, tanks, aircraft parts, nuclear reactors... Things South Korea is bad at producing: Software. Not too bad overall.

> Things South Korea is good at producing: Cars, ships, steel, semiconductors, electronics, medicines, tanks, aircraft parts, nuclear reactors...

Also: music and TV shows.

> Things South Korea is bad at producing: Software.

Also: babies.

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

#924

Post by arcfour »

alluro2 wrote: post #917
arcfour wrote: post #906

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's quite wild to think how US wouldn't want access to their data on a plate, through AWS/GCP/Azure. You must not be aware of the last decade of news when it comes to US and security.

The US and South Korea are allies, and SK doesn't have much particular strategic value that I'm aware of? At least not anything they wouldn't already be sharing with the US?

Can you articulate what particular advantages the US would be pursuing by stealing SK secret data (assuming it was not protected sufficiently on AWS/GCP to prevent this, and assuming that platform security features have to be defeated to extract this data—this is a lot of risk from the US's side, to go after this data, if they are found out in this hypothetical, I might add, so "they would steal whatever just to have it" is doubtful to me).

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

#925

Post by smcin »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #394
shantara wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A year ago, I would have easily claimed the same thing about Denmark.

I don't follow. Can you share more context?

The current US admin's threats to annex Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark.

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

#926

Post by cyphar »

robocat wrote: post #722
zestyping wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It seems New Zealand is one of very few countries where that is the case, and that's because you guys have a government scheme that provides equivalent coverage for personal injury without being a form of insurance (ACC). As far as I understand, part of the registration fees you pay go to ACC. I would argue this is basically a mandatory insurance system with another name.

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

#927

Post by cyphar »

arcfour wrote: post #924
alluro2 wrote: post #917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite wild to think how US wouldn't want access to their data on a plate, through AWS/GCP/Azure. You must not be aware of the last decade of news when it comes to US and security.

The US and South Korea are allies, and SK doesn't have much particular strategic value that I'm aware of? At least not anything they wouldn't already be sharing with the US? Can you articulate what particular advantages the US would be pursuing by stealing SK secret data (assuming it was not protected sufficiently on AWS/GCP to prevent this, and assuming that platform security features have to be defeated to extract…

The NSA phone-tapped Angela Merkel's phone while she was chancellor as well as her staff and the staff of her predecessor[1], despite the two countries also being close allies. "We are allies, why would they need to spy on us?" is therefore proveably not enough of a reason for the US to not spy on you (let's not forget that the NSA spies on the entire planet's internet communications).

The US also has a secret spy facility in Pine Gap that is believed to (among other things) spy on Australian communications, again despite both countries being very close allies. No Australians know what happens at Pine Gap, so maybe they just sit around knitting all day, but it seems somewhat unlikely.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/08/nsa-tapped-g...

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

#928

Post by kazinator »

don_esteban wrote: post #878
waterTanuki wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this is any different than countries putting significant portions of their gold & currency reserves in the NY Federal Reserve Bank. If for some reason the U.S. just decided to declare "Your monies are all mine now" the effects would be equally if not more devastating than a data breach.

Exactly that happened to Russia, Iran, Venezuela

Not North Korea though; they just have hundreds of thousands of dollars of unpaid parking tickets invested in the USA, which is a negative.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/north-korea-parking-ti... [2017]

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

#929

Post by yrcyk »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #550
bane wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the article, my read (which could be wrong) is that the backup was in the same room as the original.

No. It says that "most systems" in this data center are backed up to separate hardware on a different floor, and then a backup is made at a physically remote location. This particular G-Drive system was not on the standard backup process - it sounds like it was much higher volume than any others, so maybe they couldn't use it. They did have a pilot going to get G-Drive backed up...it was supposed to be scaled up to t…

From what I'm seeing that pilot is about NTOPS (National Total Operation Platform System) which they use to manage everything, and since this was on the floor above the fire it made recovery a lot more complicated

There's a high chance i'm missing something though, where did you read about a G-Drive backup system?

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

#930

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

hobofan wrote: post #725
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.

The fun part will be finding them, figuring out their relevance, and re-digitizing them in a useful form.
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