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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 i
by StopDisinfo910 1y ago
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.
- VirusNewbie 1y ago[flagged]
- lukevp 1y agoHow’s that? Using encryption, which is known to have backdoors and is vulnerable to nation state cracking?
- vbezhenar 1y agoIt is much more likely and cheaper, that US marines will desant and capture your backup facility, than someone would break AES-128.
- senko 1y agoSending troops would be an act of war, and definitely not cheap. Stealing some encryption keys, just another Wednesday.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- VirusNewbie 1y agoYou mean like blowing up an oil pipeline? Accidents happen all the time. It is quite a lot cheaper to have an 'accident' happen to a data center than to break AES-256.
- lofaszvanitt 1y agoThere might be unknown unknowns....
- croes 1y agoThere are less public options to get the data without breaking encryption especially when the target uses MS software
- zaphirplane 1y agoNow I’m down the rabbit hole of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
- xoa 1y ago>Using encryption, which is known to have backdoors and is vulnerable to nation state cracking? WTF are you talking about? There are absolutely zero backdoors of any kind known to be in any standard open source encryption systems, and symmetric cryptography 256-bits or more is not subject to cracking by anyone or anything, not even if general purpose quantum computers are doable and prove scalable. Shor's algorithm applies to public-key not symmetric, where the best that can be done is Grover's quantum search for a square-root speed up. You seem to be crossing a number of streams here in your information.
- 100721 1y agoAs someone who’s fairly tech-literate but has a big blind spot in cryptography, I’d love to hear any suggestions you have for articles, blog posts, or smaller books on the topic! My (rudimentary, layman) understanding is that encryption is almost like a last line of defense and should never be assumed to be unbreakable. You sound both very knowledgeable on the topic, and very confident in the safety of modern encryption. I’m thinking maybe my understanding is obsolete!
- almostgotcaught 1y ago> My (rudimentary, layman) understanding is that encryption is almost like a last line of defense and should never be assumed to be unbreakable Lol this is woefully misinformed.
- solarengineer 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography It is my understanding that current encrypted content can someday be decrypted.
- Tempest1981 1y agoYep, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now,_decrypt_later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now,_decrypt_later
- DHolzer 1y agoPlease provide any proof or references to what you are claiming.
- zaran 1y agoCan you provide an example of a commonly used cryptography system that is known to be vulnerable to nation state cracking? As for backdoors, they may exist if you rely on a third party but it's pretty hard to backdoor the relatively simple algorithms used in cryptography
- roncesvalles 1y agoIt's not so much that there is a way to directly crack an encrypted file as much as there being backdoors in the entire HW and SW chain of you decrypting and accessing the encrypted file. Short of you copying an encrypted file from the server onto a local trusted Linux distro (with no Intel ME on the machine), airgapping yourself, entering the decryption passphrase from a piece of paper (written by hand, never printed), with no cameras in the room, accessing what you need, and then securely wiping the machine without un-airgapping, you will most likely be tripping through several CIA-backdoored things. Basically, the extreme level of digital OPSEC maintained by OBL is probably the bare minimum if your adversary is the state machinery of the United States or China.
- notpushkin 1y agoYeah, but also consider that maybe not every agency of South Korea needs this level of protection?
- southernplaces7 1y agoThis is a nation state in a state of perpetual tension, formal war and persistent attempts at sabotage by a notoriously paranoid and unscrupulous next-door enemy totalitarian/crime family state. SK should have no shortage of motive or much trouble (it's an extremely wealthy country with a very well-funded, sophisticated government apparatus) implementing its own version of hardcore data security for backups.
- lmm 1y ago> Can you provide an example of a commonly used cryptography system that is known to be vulnerable to nation state cracking? DES. Almost all pre-2014 standards-based cryptosystems due to NIST SP 800-90A. Probably all other popular ones too (like, if the NSA doesn't have backdoors to all the popular hardware random number generators then I don't know what they're even doing all day), but we only ever find out about that kind of thing 30 years down the line.
- belorn 1y agoAs a sysadmin at company that provide fairly sensitive services, I find online cloud backups to be way to slow for the purpose of protecting against something like the server room being destroyed by a fire. Even something like spinning disks at a remote location feel like a risk, as files would need to be copied onto faster disks before services could be restored, and that copying would take precious time during an emergency. When downtime means massive losses of revenue for customers, being down for hours or even days while waiting for the download to finish is not going be accepted. Restoring from cloud backups is one of those war stories that I occasionally hear, including the occasionally fedex solution of sending the backup disk by carrier.
- davkan 1y agoMany organizations are willing to accept the fallbacks of cloud backup storage because it’s the tertiary backup in the event of physical catastrophe. In my experience those tertiary backups are there to prevent the total loss of company IP in the should an entire site be lost. If you only have one office and it burns down work will be severely impacted anyway. Obviously the calculus changes with maximally critical systems where lives are lost if the systems are down or you are losing millions per hour of downtime.
- Loudergood 1y agoYou're not designing to protect from data loss, you're designing to protect from downtime.
- samus 1y agoSK would be totally fine with that though because that means there would eventually be recovery!
- efitz 1y agoFor truly colossal amounts of data, fedex has more bandwidth than fiber. I don’t know if any cloud providers will send you your stuff on physical storage, but most will allow you to send your stuff to them on physical storage- eg AWS snowball. There are two main reasons why people struggle with cloud restore: 1. Not enough incoming bandwidth. The cloud’s pipe is almost certainly big enough to send your data to you. Yours may not be big enough to receive it. 2. Cheaping out on storage in the cloud. If you want fast restores, you can’t use the discount reduced redundancy low performance glacier tier. You will save $$$ right until the emergency where you need it. Pay for the flagship storage tier- normal AWS S3, for example- or splurge and buy whatever cross-region redundancy offering they have. Then you only need to worry about problem #1.
- croes 1y agoThat’s why Microsoft can't guarantee data sovereignty https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45061153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45061153
- somenameforme 1y agoHe obviously meant encrypting before uploading. At that point it doesn't matter who's holding your data or what they try to do with it.
- marcoglauser 1y agoIt still matters who holds your data. Yes they can't read it, but they can hold it ransom. What if the US decides it wants to leverage the backups in tariff negotiations or similar? Not saying this would happen, but as a state level actor, you have to prepare for these eventualities.
- somenameforme 1y agoThat's why you backup to numerous places and in numerous geopolitical blocs. Single points of failure are always a bad idea. You have to create increasingly absurd scenarios for there to be a problem.
- dijit 1y agoor… hear me out… you obviate the need for complex solutions like that by simply having a second site.
- chatmasta 1y agoNothing increases the risk of servers catching fire like government investigators showing up to investigate allegations that North Korea hacked the servers.
- ateng 1y agoIt _almost_ sounds like you're suggesting the fire was deliberate!
- wongarsu 1y agoIt is very convenient timing
- razakel 1y ago>This file contains the complete set of papers, except for a number of secret documents, a few others which are part of still active files, some correspondence lost in the floods of 1967... >Was 1967 a particularly bad winter? >No, a marvellous winter. We lost no end of embarrassing files.
- url00 1y agoYes minister! Great show that no one in the US has heard of which is a shame.
- linksnapzz 1y ago"We must do something --> this is something --> We must do this!"
- cm2187 1y agoOr 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)
- acchow 1y ago> The issue here is not refusing to use a foreign third party. That makes sense. Encrypt before sending to a third party?
- jeroenhd 1y agoOf course you'd encrypt the data before uploading it to a third party, but there's no reason why that third party should be under control of a foreign government. South Korea has more than one data center they can store data inside of, there's no need to trust other governments sigh every byte of data you've gathered, even if there are no known backdoors or flaws in your encryption mechanism (which I'm sure some governments have been looking into for decades).
- yetihehe 1y agoThere is a reason that NIST recommends new encryption algorithms from time to time. If you get a copy of ALL government data, in 20 years you might be able to break encryption and get access to ALL government data from 20yr ago, no matter how classified they were, if they were stored in that cloud. Such data might still be valuable, because not all data is published after some period.
- rstuart4133 1y agoThat doesn't sound like a good excuse to me. aes128 has been the formal standard for 23 years. The only "foreseeable" event that could challenge it is quantum computing. The likely post quantum replacement is ... aes256, which is already a NIST standard. NIST won't replace aes256 in the foreseeable future. All that aside, there is no shortage of ciphers. If you are worried about one being broken, chain a few of them together. And finally, no secret has to last forever. Western governments tend to declassify just about everything after 50 years. After 100 everyone involved is well and truly dead.
- indolering 1y agoThat's going away. We are seeing reduced deprecations of crypto algorithms over time AFAICT. The mathematical foundations are becoming better understood and the implementations' assurance levels are improving too. I think we are going up the bathtub curb here. The value of said data diminishes with time too. You can totally do an off-site cloud backup with mitigation fallbacks should another country become unfriendly. Hell, shard them such that you need n-of-m backups to reconstruct and host each node in a different jurisdiction. Not that South Korea couldn't have Samsung's Joyent acquisition handle it.
- schainks 1y agoCall me a conspiracy theorist, but this kind of mismanagement is intentional by design so powerful people can hide their dirty laundry.
- FooBarWidget 1y agoNever attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. There was that time when some high profile company's entire Google Cloud account was destroyed. Backups were on Google Cloud too. No off-site backups.
- schainks 1y agoOne of the data integrity people sadly committed suicide as a result of this fire, so I am also thinking this was an incompetence situation (https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20251003030351530 https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20251003030351530). For the budget spent, you’d think they would clone the setup in Busan and sync it daily or something like this in lieu of whatever crazy backup they needed to engineer but couldn’t.
- wjnc 1y agoYou have to balance that with how low can you expect human beings to lower their standards when faced with bureaucratic opposition. No backups on a key system would increase the likelihood of malice versus stupidity, since the importance of backups is known to IT staff regardless of role and seniority for only 40 years or so.
- ayewo 1y agoYou were probably thinking of UniSuper [0], an Australian investment company with more than $80B AUM. Their 3rd party backups with another provider were crucial to helping them undo the damage from the accidental deletion by GCloud. GCloud eventually shared a post-mortem [1] about what went down. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40304666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40304666 1: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/details-of-google-cloud-gcve-incident https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...
- 1y ago
- thanatos519 1y agoBackups should be far away, too. Apparently some companies lost everything on 9/11 because their backups were in the other tower.
- szundi 1y ago[dead]
- zwnow 1y agoFunnily enough, Germany has laws for where you are allowed to store backups exactly due to these kinda issues. Fire, flood, earthquake, tornadoes, whatever you name, backups need to be stored with appropriate security in mind.
- egorfine 1y agoGermany, of course. Like my company needs government permission to store backups.
- leipert 1y agoMore like: your company (or government agency) is critical infrastructure or of a certain size, so there are obligations on how you maintain your records. It’s not like the US or other countries don’t have similar requirements.
- egorfine 1y ago[flagged]
- leipert 1y agoNope: The other way around. If you are of a certain size, you are required to ensure certain criteria. NIS-2 is the EU directive and it more or less maps to ISO27001 which includes risk management against physical catastrophes. https://www.openkritis.de/eu/eu-nis-2-germany.html https://www.openkritis.de/eu/eu-nis-2-germany.html Of course you can do backups if you are smaller, or comply with such a standard if you so wish.
- stego-tech 1y agoThis. Speaking specifically from the IT side of things, an employer or customer refusing to do backups is the biggest red flag I can get, an immediate warning to run the fuck away before you get blamed for their failure, stego-tech kind of situation. That being said, I can likely guess where this ends up going: * Current IT staff and management are almost certainly scapegoated for “allowing this to happen”, despite the program in question (G-DRIVE) existing since 2017 in some capacity. * Nobody in government will question sufficiently what technical reason is/was given to justify the lack of backups and why that was never addressed, why the system went live with such a glaring oversight, etc, because that would mean holding the actual culprits accountable for mismanagement * Everyone involved is unlikely to find work again anytime soon once names are bandied about in investigations * The major cloud providers will likely win several contracts for “temporary services” that in actuality strip the sovereignty the government had in managing its own system, even if they did so poorly * Other countries will use this to justify outsourcing their own sovereign infrastructure to private enterprise This whole situation sucks ass because nothing good is likely to come of this, other than maybe a handful of smart teams lead by equally competent managers using this to get better backup resources for themselves.
- qzw 1y agoI abhor the general trend of governments outsourcing everything to private companies, but in this case, a technologically advanced country’s central government couldn’t even muster up the most basic of IT practices, and as you said, accountability will likely not rest with the people actually responsible for this debacle. Even a nefarious cloud services CEO couldn’t dream up a better sales case for the wholesale outsourcing of such infrastructure in the future.
- xp84 1y agoI'm with you. It's really sad that this provides such a textbook case of why not to own your own infrastructure. Practically speaking, I think a lot of what is offered by Microsoft, Google, and the other big companies that are selling into this space is vastly overpriced and way too full of lock-in, taking this stuff in-house without sufficient knowhow and maturity is even more foolish. It's like not hiring professional truck drivers, but instead of at least people who can basically drive a truck, hiring someone who doesn't even know how to drive a car.
- someuser2345 1y ago> The issue here is not refusing to use a foreign third party. That makes sense. For anyone else who's confused, G-Drive means Government Drive, not Google Drive.
- saghm 1y agoYeah, the whole supposed benefit of an organization using storage the cloud is to avoid stuff like this from happening. Instead, they managed to make the damage far worse by increasing the amount of data lost by centralizing it.
- jstummbillig 1y agoIt does only make sense if you are competent enough to manage data, and I mean: Any part of it, forever. It's not impossible, of course, but it is really not as trivial as the self-host crowd makes it out to be, if you absolutely need a certain amount of 9s of reliability. There is a reason why AWS etc can exist. I am sure the cloud market is not entirely reasonable but certainly far more reasonable than relying on some mid consultant to do this for you at this scale.
- fnordpiglet 1y agoThe issue is without profit incentive of course it isn’t X (backed up, redundant, highly available, whatever other aspect is optimized away by accountants). Having worked a great deal inside of aws on these things aws provides literally every conceivable level of customer managed security down to customer owned and keyed datacenters operated by aws, with master key HSMs owned, purchased by the customer, with customer managed key hierarchies at all levels and detailed audit logs of everything done by everything including aws itself. The security assurance of aws is far and away beyond what even the most sophisticated state actor infrastructure does and is more modern to boot - because it’s profit incentive drives that. Most likely this was not about national security than about nationalism. They’re easily confused but that’s fallacious. And they earned the dividends of fallacious thinking.
- arcfour 1y agoI 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 they do have a vested interest in South Korean data, presumably for NK.
- alluro2 1y agoIt'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.
- arcfour 1y agoThe 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).
- cyphar 1y agoThe 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-german-chancellery-decades-wikileaks-claims-merkel https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/08/nsa-tapped-g...