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Comment by jftr

9 days ago

Phrack's timeline may read like it, but it wasn't an onsite inspection due to hacking, but a scheduled maintenance to replace the overdue UPS, hence battery-touching involved. Even the image they linked just says "scheduled maintenance."

16 comments

jftr

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danudey  9 days ago

So right after the investigation was announced, they suddenly scheduled a UPS battery replacement which happened to start a fire big enough to destroy the entire data centre and all data or evidence?

Yeah, that's way less suspicious, thanks for clearing that up.

  • naruhodo  9 days ago

    My mind initially went to a government cover-up, but then:

    > 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?

    • KaiserPro  8 days ago

      It could have.

      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.

      2 replies →

  • positron26  9 days ago

    UPS, check. Any kind of reasonable fire extinguisher, nah.

    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.

    • jychang  9 days ago

      If the theory "north korea hacked the UPS batteries to blow" is true, though, then it makes more sense why fire suppression wasn't able to kick in on time.

dmix  9 days ago

Supply chain interceptions can happen for batteries and other electronics being used.