[danudey]

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]

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]

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.

[gtech1]

Don't you have to put UPS's in bypass mode precisely for this reason while doing maintenance on them ?

[KaiserPro]

Yeah, but the problem is that the batteries are still full of juice.

Obviously for rack based UPSs you'd "just" take out the UPS, or battery drawer, and replace somewhere more safe, or better yet, swap out the entire thing.

For more centralised UPSs that gets more difficult. The shitty old large UPSs were a bunch of cells bolted to a bus bar, and then onto the switchgear/concentraitor.

for Lithium, I would hope its proper electrical connectors, but you can never really tell.

[lazystar]

this was a plot in a Mr. Robot episode, heh. Life imitating art?

[asimovDev]

was there a battery hacking episode? I can't remember the show anymore, might be due in for a rewatch it seems.

[voidUpdate]

They hacked the firmware of the UPSs inside e-corp to destroy all paper records. The steel mountain hack was messing with the climate controls using a raspi to destroy tape archives

[dijit]

iirc that’s how they destroyed “steel mountain”.

[PapaPalpatine]

That's exactly where my mind went!

[positron26]

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]

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.