Comment by ionwake

Yeah, all this chatter about technologies and processes that could have saved this: you don't think someone in all of Korean government knew about that?

The problem is more likely culture, hierarchy or corruption. Guaranteed several principal security architects have been raising the alarm on this internally along with much safer, redundant, secure alternatives that came with an increased cost. And decision makers who had a higher rank/social/networking advantage shot it down. Maybe the original storage designer was still entrenched there and sabotaging all other proposals out of pride. Or there's an unspoken business relationship with the another department providing resources for that data center that generates kickbacks.

Assuming nobody knows how to do an offsite backup or is plain ignorant of risk over there is arrogant.

It's a common problem in any field that presumably revolves around intellect, since supposedly being smarter gets you further (it may, but it is not enough on its lonesome).

People, in general, severely overestimate their own intelligence and grossly underestimate the intelligence of others.

Consider for a moment that most of the geniuses on hacker news are not even smart enough to wonder whether or not something like IQ is actually a meaningful or appropriate way to measure intelligence, examine the history of this notion, question what precisely it is we mean by that term, how its use can vary with context, etc. etc.