🇰🇷 Blaze wipes out South Korean government data: negligence or sabotage?

South Korea is facing a technological nightmare after losing 858 terabytes of government data in a fire.

Critics say it could have been arson.

What is known so far?

🔶 The blaze erupted on September 26 at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) facility in Daejeon

🔶 Reports say that a lithium-ion battery exploded, sparking a fire that quickly engulfed the server racks hosting G-Drive, the government’s cloud storage platform that was launched in 2017

🔶 Powering 163 public services, from import/export permits to safety checks, G-Drive served 17% of civil servants — roughly 125,000 people.

🔶All the data is irreversibly lost, as no external backups for the system were created

🔶 With all work on G-Drive lost, operations have stalled, impacting everything from meeting notes to National Assembly documents

Catastrophic single point of failure

👉 “The G-Drive couldn't have a backup system due to its large capacity,” one South Korean government source told newspaper The Chosun

👉 Only G-Drive was deleted, while “the remaining 95 systems have backup data in online or offline forms,” the same official said

👉 But that contradicts industry norms, where redundancy is essential for large-scale data management, experts say

🗣"This is blatant negligence by the architects and those who made the decision. Information security principles are based precisely on data backup," cybersecurity expert Maksim Arefyev tells Sputnik.

💬"There should have been 100% backup and restoration capabilities in case of data loss. Fire protection measures were also not implemented," he charged.

Arefyev doesn't rule out sabotage in the lithium battery explosion.

🗣"Yes, this could indeed be," echoes information and cybersecurity expert Sergey Vakulin.

Who benefits?

💬"It mainly benefits those who don’t want this information to be preserved," Vakulin tells Sputnik. "If the information contained details about certain people, that would already be considered a motive."

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