We often think of threats to our digital world as being, well, digital. We picture hackers in dark rooms, malicious software, and phishing emails. However, a recent incident at a major government data centre in South Korea provides a powerful reminder that physical risks can cause just as much, if not more, digital devastation.
In late September, a fire at the National Information Resource Service centre paralysed a vast swathe of the country’s online public services. The cause was not a sophisticated cyber-attack, but something far more tangible: an exploding lithium-ion battery.
The event serves as a stark analogy for cyber security, highlighting that the best defence—whether against fire or a digital breach—is proactive management.
The Spark and the Digital Inferno
The fire reportedly began during maintenance work on an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) system. These systems are crucial, providing emergency power to keep servers running during an outage. Ironically, the very thing designed to ensure uptime became the cause of a catastrophic downtime.
An aging battery module, believed to be more than a year beyond its 10-year recommended service life, exploded. This triggered a thermal runaway, a dangerous chain reaction where one failing battery cell causes adjacent cells to overheat and fail, leading to an intense and hard-to-control blaze.
The results were disproportionate.
- Massive Outage: The fire and emergency shutdowns took approximately one-third of the nation’s online public services offline.
- Critical Services Affected: Mobile identity authentication, email, and even the emergency-response GPS tracking service were impacted.
- Difficult Recovery: The blaze burned for nearly 22 hours. Firefighters were constrained, as using water in a live server room could cause even more damage.
The government was forced to revert to paper processes, and the prime minister issued a public apology. The incident has been described as a “digital Pearl Harbor,” prompting a complete rethink of the nation’s data resilience strategy.
The Proactive Parallel: Fire Risk and Cyber Risk
This incident is a powerful lesson in proactive risk management. The battery was a known risk. Lithium-ion batteries are known to degrade, and this one was past its recommended operational life. The failure was not a complete surprise; it was a risk that was not adequately managed.
This mirrors the world of cyber security perfectly.
- End-of-Life Hardware: Running a 10-year-old battery is the physical equivalent of running an unpatched, end-of-life operating system. In both cases, the risk of a critical failure increases daily.
- Proactive Maintenance: We apply security patches to software to fix known vulnerabilities before they are exploited. We should apply the same logic to physical infrastructure, replacing aging components before they can fail catastrophically.
- Assuming It “Will Not Happen to Us”: It is easy to defer maintenance. A new battery system costs money, just as upgrading software or conducting a penetration test does. Yet, the cost of inaction—a 22-hour fire, paralysed national services, and weeks of recovery—is exponentially higher.
Resilience Is More Than Just a Firewall
Both fire safety and cyber security are exercises in proactive risk reduction. You do not wait until your building is on fire to buy a smoke detector, and you should not wait until you are breached to think about security controls.
This event forces us to broaden our definition of “security.” A robust security posture considers all risks to data and services, not just digital ones.
- Like Fire Drills, Have Cyber Drills: We practise evacuating a building. Organisations should also practise responding to a ransomware attack or a data breach with tabletop exercises.
- Like Sprinkler Systems, Have Backups: The fire was hard to fight without damaging equipment. The government is now considering migrating damaged systems to a backup cloud platform. This is the goal of an off-site or cloud backup—to ensure your data is safe and recoverable, even if the original “building” is compromised.
- Like Building Codes, Have Security Standards: The South Korean government immediately pledged to tighten safety rules, mandate dual backups, and physically separate power systems from server halls. These are proactive standards, born from a reactive crisis. Your organisation can implement similar standards—such as multi-factor authentication and regular security audits—before a crisis forces your hand.
Do Not Wait for the Alarm
The fire in Daejeon was a physical failure that caused a digital disaster. It demonstrates that our reliance on technology is only as strong as the physical infrastructure and management processes that support it.
Whether the threat is an old battery or an unpatched vulnerability, the principle remains the same: proactive risk management is the key to resilience. Do not wait for the smoke alarm to sound before you think about fire safety.
If this event has you considering the gaps in your own organisation’s resilience—both digital and physical—it may be time for a comprehensive review.
To understand how a layered security strategy and robust resilience plan can help protect your operations, contact the experts at Vertex Cyber Security.