Fire Destroys S. Korean Government's Cloud Storage System, No Backups Available

Edit: my bad backups in the room is something, somehow just forgot about that part

Having had unfortunate encounters with government IT in other countries I can bet that the root cause wasn't the national culture. It was the internal culture of "I want to do the same exact same thing I've always done until the day I retire."

Absent outside pressure, civil services across the word tend advance scientifically - one funeral (or retirement) at a time.

Yes its pricey but possible.

Now its literally impossible.

I think that AWS Glacier at that scale should be the thing preferred as they had their own in house data too but they still should've wanted an external backup and they are literally by the govt. so they of all people shouldn't worry about prices.

Have secure encrypted backups in aws and other possibilities too and try to create a system depending on how important the treat model is in the sense that absolutely filter out THE MOST important stuff out of those databases but that would require them to label it which I suppose would make them gather even more attention to somehow exfiltrate / send them to things like north korea/china so its definitely a mixed bag.

my question as I said multiple times, why didn't they build a backup in south korea only and used some other datacentre in south korea only as the backup to not have to worry about encryption thing but I don't really know and imo it would make more sense for them to actually have a backup in aws and not worry about encryption personally since I find the tangents of breaking encryption a bit unreasonable since if that's the case, then all bets are off and the servers would get hacked too and that was the point of phrack with the advanced persistent threat and so much more...

are we all forgetting that intel has a proprietory os minix running in the most privileged state which can even take java bytecode through net and execute it and its all proprietory. That is a bigger security threat model personally to me if they indeed are using that which I suppose they might be using.

You of course need people to maintain it -- the $300k turnkey solution might be the better option depending on current staff.

Alternate hypothesis: cloud storage provided doing the hard sell. Hahaha :)

LG is SK firm and manufacturer of hacked hardware and also the batteries that caught fire. Not sure it’s a solid theory just something I took note of while thinking the same

> 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?

A Kakao datacenter fire took the de-facto national chat app offline not too many years ago. Imagine operating a service that was nearly ubiquitous in the state of California and not being able to survive one datacenter outage.

After reading the Phrack article, I don't know what to suspect, the typical IT disaster preparedness or the operators turning off the fire suppression main and ordering anyone in the room to evacuate to give a little UPS fire enough time to start going cabinet to cabinet.