Government ignores own vulnerability while demanding redundancy from businesses

A fire at a major state data center halted 647 government services at the same time.

The state administration has been effectively paralyzed.

The National Information Resources Service under the Ministry of the Interior and Safety provides 1,600 government services online, and more than a third of them were down due to a fire in a computer room at its headquarters in Daejeon on Friday.

Restoring the 96 systems damaged or destroyed by the fire is expected to take considerable time.

It is deplorable that this is not the first time the agency's services have been disrupted by an accident. In November 2023, a faulty router port caused disruptions to the government network used by public officials and to one public-facing online service. This time, a fire disrupted almost all administrative services.

The incident also revealed a fatal weak point in terms of national security. If state functions were paralyzed helplessly for this long due to a cyber or terrorist attack, it would be a very serious matter. What's the use of conducting the Ulchi drill each year to prepare government officials for a state of national emergency?

The fire was presumably caused by the explosion of a lithium-ion battery that subcontracted employees had tried to move from the computer room to the basement for a battery replacement. The batteries were part of an uninterruptible power supply system for use in the case of an outage.

The exploded battery, which was installed in the room in August 2014, was about a year past its 10-year service life.

A probe is needed to determine whether the incident was sparked by the obsolescence of the battery, an error in the process of unplugging it or another technical issue.

The salient reason that online government services failed to be restored quickly is that data center redundancy was not in place at other sites, according to experts.

Important components of computer networks have to be duplicated in the case of an accident. If the primary component fails, a backup should seamlessly prevent a rupture in services.

The NIRS says it has the data backed up at two regional branches outside its Daejeon headquarters, but there is no emergency system yet in place to handle backup data.

As a result, the nation faces a dire situation where no one knows when the disrupted services will restart. Furthermore, as data backups were performed periodically, data lost in the recent fire before it could be backed up will take some time to gather.

The government cites a lack of funding as a major reason for the failure to prepare an emergency duplicate or twin system, but it is unconvincing that there was no money to spend on the safety of state computer networks while splurging on trillions of won in cash handouts to everyone to boost public livelihoods.

In October 2022, the KakaoTalk messenger application used by virtually all Korean cellphone users, was halted due to a lithium-ion battery fire at its data center in Pangyo, Gyeonggi Province. At that time, the government demanded that private businesses secure cloud servers for data center redundancy. Yet the government did not take such complementary measures itself. It sat on its hands for almost three years.

The government said it has built systems that can restore online services in case of a disaster within three hours, but it turned out to be an exaggeration. There is no redundancy system to handle backup data in an emergency.

These are the times when the government's functions stop if its computer network stops. The management of a state relies on the safety of its digital network. The government has presented an ambitious blueprint for the world's best digital government, but the fire made a mockery of those plans.

The administration must take the accident as an occasion to review all of its digital infrastructure and institute a high level of redundancy without delay.


khnews@heraldcorp.com