Who has the incentive to do this, though? China/North Korea? Or someone in South Korea trying to cover up how bad they messed up? Does adding this additional mess on top mean they looked like they messed up less? (And for that to be true, how horrifically bad does the hack have to be?)
Not saying I believe this (or even know enough to have an opinion), but it’s always important to not anthropomorphize a large organization. The government isn’t one person (even in totalitarian societies) but an organization that contains large numbers of people who may all have their own motivations.
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
Yeah, that's way less suspicious, thanks for clearing that up.
> 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?
But
replacing a UPS is usually done to right time pressures. the problem is, you can rarely de-energise UPS batteries before replacing them, you just need to be really careful when you do it.
Depending on the UPS, Bus bars can be a mother fucker to get on, and of they touch energised they tend to weld together.
With lead acid, its pretty bad (think molten metal and lots of acidic, toxic and explosive gas, with lithium, its just fire. lots of fire that is really really hard to put out.
Obviously for rack based UPSs you'd "just" take out the UPS, or battery drawer, and replace somewhere more safe, or better yet, swap out the entire thing.
For more centralised UPSs that gets more difficult. The shitty old large UPSs were a bunch of cells bolted to a bus bar, and then onto the switchgear/concentraitor.
for Lithium, I would hope its proper electrical connectors, but you can never really tell.
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.
Recently in the UK a major communication company had issues with batteries
Bravo, old boy.
Anyway, shoe production has never been better.
How do we know it's NK? Because there are comments in north-korean language, duh! Why are you asking, are you russian bot or smt??
The bad news is: they're in North Korea.
"But that's a blessed event? How could that be terrible?"
"He appeared in Salt Lake City."
You delete your data, trash your gear, and hop on a bus, to start over in some other city, in a different line of work.
The timing as well is very suspicious and I think that there can be a lot of discussion about this
Right now, I am wondering about the name most tbh which might seem silly but "APT down - The North Korean files"
It seems that APT means in this case advanced persistent threat but I am not sure what they mean by Apt Down, like the fact that it got shut down by their journalism or-? I am sorry if this may seem naive and on a serious note this raises so many questions...
https://www.thetakeout.com/1789352/korea-apt-drinking-game-r...
Compromised batteries or battery controllers?
This story is really unbelievable.
I'm guessing lithium-ion batteries were not a factor years ago when those decisions were made.
As the other commenter said, Halon hasn't been a thing for a fair while, but inert gas fire suppression systems in general are still popular.
I would expect it wouldn't be sufficient for a lithium ion battery fire - you'd temporarily displace the oxygen, sure, but the conditions for fire would still exist - as soon as enough nitrogen (or whatever suppressant gas is in use) dissipates, it'd start back up again.
Also as I understand thermal runaway is self-sustaining, since the lithium ion batteries have a limited capacity to provide their own oxygen (something to do with the cathode breaking down?), so it might continue burning even while the area is mostly flooded with inert gas.
I believe it would be similar to an EV car fire, that is, you'd have to flood the area with water and wait for it to cool down enough that thermal runaway stops. Maybe they can do better these days with encapsulating agents but I'd still expect the rack housing the UPS to be a write-off.
(Edit: sorry, in hindsight it's obvious the comment I'm replying to was referring to inert gas systems, and not halogenated systems)
Halon and friends don't work through an oxygen displacement mechanism, their fire suppression effects are primarily due to how the halogen moieties interfere with the decomposition of other substances in the flame. IIRC, A key mechanism is the formation of hydrogen(!) from hydrogen radicals.
Apparently if the calibration is correct, halon can de deployed in a space to suppress a fire without posing as asphyxiation risk.
A good review is here: https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/el/fire_research...
96 servers isn’t that many, probably less than 10 racks and given the state of the backups it would track that they didn’t spring for halon.
It's just in NK or china.
Yikes.
2 HN front page articles in 1!
This was also often tied to a big counter culture movement. Which one interesting thing is that many of those people now define the culture. I guess not too unlike how many hippies changed when they grew up
Etymology quibble: There is no 'c' in phreaking. Phrack is just a portmanteau of "phreak" and "hack". :)
> Phrack is just a portmanteau of "phreak" and "hack". :)
Thankfully I made the right choice to stay on Bitwarden instead of moving to Proton Pass.