Online services solve a variety of trivial problems such as applying for a queue number at the National Health Service, ordering medicine at a MOH clinic and renewing a passport. It is difficult for us to return to the old, less efficient system. However, this is what happened to South Koreans after the national IT system was paralyzed due to a fire at the South Korean National Information Resource Service data center in Daejeon.
Due to the fire at the data center, 647 government IT services were disrupted. The National Information Resource Service is the backbone of around 1,600 South Korean government services with data centers located in Daejeon, Gwangju and Daegu.
Services were disrupted while waiting for the fire to be extinguished. Because it is a data center, the fire cannot be extinguished with water and instead a carbon dioxide extinguishing system is used.
According to a report published by the Korea Herald last weekend, the fire was caused by a battery used by a UPS backup power system in case of a power outage. As of this morning, only 47 services have been restored with the process of restoring operations being carried out in stages. A total of 96 systems were destroyed in the fire, with the system expected to be back online in two weeks.
The disruption to South Korea's IT infrastructure is reminiscent of the Indonesian National Data Center that was targeted by the Lockbit ransomware last year. Failure to perform regular backups caused 210 government agency services to be disrupted, with the hackers demanding a ransom of IDR 131 billion (~RM 33 million). But the Brain Cipher hacking group later unlocked the data for free, out of compassion for the Indonesian people who fell victim to their attack.