Datacenter fire takes 647 South Korean government services offline

Over 600 e-government services operated by South Korea’s government are offline after a datacenter fire disrupted operations. The fire struck on Friday night at a datacenter operated by South Korea’s National Information Resources Service. Korean media report that technicians replacing a lithium-ion battery inadvertently …

[DS999]

Allowing SMS

Makes sense in India for the 1.0 version of this. It isn't ideal but 2FA w/SMS is no less secure than the 1FA currently being used by many, and importantly there appears to be no REQUIREMENT for a given bank / payment provider to support SMS as a 2FA option. India still has millions using dumbphones that don't support dedicated 2FA apps, for them SMS may be the only option for now.

Get people used to 2FA, work out all the issues (such as introducing dumbphones offering a proper non SMS 2FA solution, or maybe used low end smartphones become the cheaper option and the dumbphone category disappears entirely) then you can announce a date after which SMS is no longer permitted.

[Tron]

Re: Allowing SMS

Feature phones are not going away, certainly not in India. Not everyone has the income of people on here. SMS generally works fine unless you are targeted, and 99% or people are not targeted, because it is a waste of hacking time. Most vulnerabilities are never deployed against random users, despite anti-virus companies spreading FUD to fertilise their sales. That is not a licence to be lazy, but the risk/reward balance can easily lurch too far either way (as with the OSA). What El Reg readers see as a minor change in users' tech behaviour is not minor for the vast numbers of people who are not computer literate, many of whom will always struggle. Long, unique passwords work well enough. If you increase the complexity of authentication, you just lock people out of services and create new points of failure.

[DS999]

Re: Allowing SMS

a minor change in users' tech behaviour is not minor for the vast numbers of people who are not computer literate

This is for digital payments, so the people who are not computer literate aren't relevant as they aren't paying that way in the first place.

[Taliesinawen]

E-government services and single points of failure (SPOFs)

Going on the local version, no one noticed when the e-government services when down.

[Anonymous Coward]

Datacenter fire takes 647 South Korean government services offline

Didn't know the s Korean gov. Was using OVH flammable DCs, lol.