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This story is oddly similar to the Maersk cyber-attack in 2017[1]: > The virus, once activated, propagated within just seven minutes. And for Maersk, as with o

This story is oddly similar to the Maersk cyber-attack in 2017[1]: > The virus, once activated, propagated within just seven minutes. And for Maersk, as with other organizations, the level of destruction was enormous. > As well as affecting print and file-sharing capabilities, laptops, apps and servers, NotPetya severely damaged both Maersk’s implementations of DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) and Active Directory, which, respectively, allow devices to participate in networks by allocating IP addresses and provide a directory lookup for valid addresses. Along with those, the technology controlling its access to cloud services was also damaged and became unstable while its service bus was completely lost. > Banks is candid about the breadth of the impact: “There was 100% destruction of anything based on Microsoft that was attached to the network.” > In a stroke of luck, they were able to retrieve an undamaged copy of its Active Directory from the Maersk office in Nigeria. It had been unaffected by NotPetya purely because of a power outage in Lagos that had taken the service offline while the virus was spreading. A rather nervous local Maersk employee was tasked with transporting the crucial data to Denmark. What this says to me is that multiple offline backups (or failing that, copies) will save your bacon some day. [1] https://www.i-cio.com/management/insight/item/maersk-springing-back-from-a-catastrophic-cyber-attack https://www.i-cio.com/management/insight/item/maersk-springi...

hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
Offline backups work ~now~ but it won’t be long until rootkits start corrupting data being pushed/pulled by backup servers.
- rectang 5y ago
  Continuously restoring from a copy of the data you sent to cold storage provides an additional layer of protection. If an attacker get root they can theoretically disable the continuous restoration, but the more moving parts they have to tweak the more likely that they'll be noticed while the org still has access to decent backups.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
    Unless the validation system has been compromised too. But I agree, it should increase the cost to attackers substantially.
monocasa 5y ago
That's one of the ideas behind use of tape storage today interestingly. It's pretty hard (although not impossible) for hackers to get at tapes sitting on a shelf.
- 999900000999 5y ago
  If I write a text file to a USB drive without any iot features, and then throw the USB drive in my closet I'm not seeing how anyone could hack it . I guess you could drop an emp pulse on my house and fry the drive, but absent that it's safe.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    Well, as a backup, USB drives don't have that great of a lifespan compared to tapes. They're also not nearly as space dense or competitive for $/GB once you've amortized the drives. And for an org, there's still attacks in both cases. Do your backups get requested through an automated system? Well you've just made a very slow tape library with people rather than robotics. Are the tapes/USB sticks encrypted and the encryption keys stored in an online system? Then the hackers have a mechanism to deny you access to the contents of the tapes, which is probably their goal anyway. Yes a USB drive with a text file is pretty safe from such attacks, but it also doesn't scale to the backup concerns of even relatively small orgs.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - tempnow987 5y ago
    They key is usually something that is pretty current but can't be corrupted. A drive in a closet doesn't get you there. The nigeria office offline due to power does. I feel good with S3 with an object lock and retention policy for backups.
    - rectang 5y ago
      Pretty current, can't be corrupted, and complete. Unless you're practicing continuous restoration to ensure that your backups are actually backing up what you need, the odds that you got everything critical are not good.
jonny_eh 5y ago
> What this says to me is that multiple offline backups (or failing that, copies) will save your bacon some day. This is why distributed version control system like Git are so nice.

hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago

Offline backups work ~now~ but it won’t be long until rootkits start corrupting data being pushed/pulled by backup servers.

rectang 5y ago
Continuously restoring from a copy of the data you sent to cold storage provides an additional layer of protection. If an attacker get root they can theoretically disable the continuous restoration, but the more moving parts they have to tweak the more likely that they'll be noticed while the org still has access to decent backups.
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
  Unless the validation system has been compromised too. But I agree, it should increase the cost to attackers substantially.

monocasa 5y ago

That's one of the ideas behind use of tape storage today interestingly. It's pretty hard (although not impossible) for hackers to get at tapes sitting on a shelf.

999900000999 5y ago
If I write a text file to a USB drive without any iot features, and then throw the USB drive in my closet I'm not seeing how anyone could hack it . I guess you could drop an emp pulse on my house and fry the drive, but absent that it's safe.
- monocasa 5y ago
  Well, as a backup, USB drives don't have that great of a lifespan compared to tapes. They're also not nearly as space dense or competitive for $/GB once you've amortized the drives. And for an org, there's still attacks in both cases. Do your backups get requested through an automated system? Well you've just made a very slow tape library with people rather than robotics. Are the tapes/USB sticks encrypted and the encryption keys stored in an online system? Then the hackers have a mechanism to deny you access to the contents of the tapes, which is probably their goal anyway. Yes a USB drive with a text file is pretty safe from such attacks, but it also doesn't scale to the backup concerns of even relatively small orgs.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tempnow987 5y ago
  They key is usually something that is pretty current but can't be corrupted. A drive in a closet doesn't get you there. The nigeria office offline due to power does. I feel good with S3 with an object lock and retention policy for backups.
  - rectang 5y ago
    Pretty current, can't be corrupted, and complete. Unless you're practicing continuous restoration to ensure that your backups are actually backing up what you need, the odds that you got everything critical are not good.

jonny_eh 5y ago

> What this says to me is that multiple offline backups (or failing that, copies) will save your bacon some day. This is why distributed version control system like Git are so nice.