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."
Yeah, that's way less suspicious, thanks for clearing that up.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
Recently in the UK a major communication company had issues with batteries