The authorities of South Korea increased the national level of cyber threat to the level of attention and the level of caution after a massive fire in one of the largest government data centers in Daejeon that immobilized 647 vital state systems. The fire broke out on Friday evening when employees were relocating lithium-ion batteries, and the fire quickly spread to the whole National Information Resources Service plant, making authorities switch hundreds of government subsystems.ย
Massive data center fire cripples government operations
The South Korean government has increased the national level of cyber threat to a higher level, that is, attention to caution, because of a fire in a large state data centre in Daejeon, to put hundreds of important government systems out of commission. Friday evening, the fire erupted at the National Information Resources Service plant as the workers moved the lithium-ion batteries. The fire was spreading fast, and its impact on infrastructure involved 647 state subsystems.
According to the Safety Ministry, 46 of those systems were back up on Monday. According to the authorities, complete recovery, particularly on the 96 systems that had been severely affected, might take up to four weeks. President Lee Jae Myung bitterly criticized the lack of strong backup procedures and insisted on the review of data security procedures.
Four are charged with negligence in the case of battery
The Daejeon police arrested four individuals in relation to the fire on occupational negligence.ย They included an onsite NIRS manager, two workers who did battery relocation, and a representative of the supervision company who was in charge of the maintenance work.
National Intelligence Service threatens increased vulnerability
The National Intelligence Service defended the escalating alert level by informing that attackers could use the weakened systems during the disruption. Within the category of the so-called caution, all government agencies are obligated to notify the National Cyber Security Center or the National Security Office of any odd network activities as soon as they occur. The warning condition needs to be better monitored, and quick reaction measures in all government networks.
Security experts note that the government infrastructures in South Korea do not have mirrored failover systems that are in real-time, and as such, this creates a vulnerability in the system when a crisis of this scale occurs. Several ministry sites that were important in accessing official documents were turned off, and the postal service returned to handling mail manually, increasing the chances of delivery delays.
The critical services are still offline to affect citizens throughout the country
Mobile IDs, which were usually substituted against hardcopy IDs, were inaccessible, and several government workers were also denied their email services. Schools could not access records of students, a national cremation booking system was hit, and even some hospitals were forced to send back citizens who lacked physical identification cards.
There is increased monitoring as it is based on the APEC summit security issues
The attack arrives at an opportune time: South Korea is hosting the APEC summit in Gyeongju later in October, which makes the security of visiting heads of government, in terms of cybersecurity, a more serious matter. According to the National Intelligence Agency, the monitoring of cyber threats had to be enhanced before the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
The attack shows that cybersecurity risks may arise due to physical disasters, whereby authorities are forced to raise the threat levels as they rush to restore key services. As the APEC summit is in the offing and recovery operations are continuing even in October, this crisis highlights the significance of robust infrastructure design and overall contingency planning to safeguard national digital resources against both physical and cyber attack.