12 ms·

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

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.
  - tempnow987 5y ago
    The idea that throwing a USB in a drawer does better is absolutely ridiculous. I think this illustrates where folks can go wrong. Many folks and business TODAY are backing up to NAS / RAID arrays etc. Many are easily corruptible by ransomware. We see this REPEATEDLY with many infections of large orgs. The basic story here is that something not editable has great value even if not perfectly current. If you do a diff every 4 hours you have covered a LOT of ground already. I've sat through continuous DR architecturing discussions - the massive cost / complexity / scale can just be out of control for many users. In many use cases Active Directory for example behind by 4 hours is not game ending. With notice to users that recent edits may not be captured you may be able to get back up and running pretty quickly.
    - rectang 5y ago
      I'm not singing the praises of "a USB in a drawer" — the medium doesn't matter, the number of copies doesn't matter. The only criteria I am considering is whether the backups are tested to prove that they actually work as intended. There are shades of gray, here: continuous restoration is a best practice, but backups which are tested even once, and perhaps incompletely, are better than backups which are never tested at all.
      - tempnow987 5y ago
        Many continuous restoration / HA systems are surprisingly vulnerable to hacks because the level of management / coordination is pretty high. They work well if datacenter 1 goes down and you want to get to datacenter 2. They work less well (in my view) if someone gets root. A fair number of public victims you read about actually DID have continuous backups / dr setups.
        rectang 5y ago
        OK, but how about at least testing that that it's actually feasible to restore from that S3 bucket of yours? Verifying that restoration is possible once is better than not testing restoration at all. As for verifying restoration on an ongoing basis, if the attacker has root I suppose we can argue about the cost/benefit ratio but continuous backup validation doesn't hurt.

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.
- tempnow987 5y ago
  The idea that throwing a USB in a drawer does better is absolutely ridiculous. I think this illustrates where folks can go wrong. Many folks and business TODAY are backing up to NAS / RAID arrays etc. Many are easily corruptible by ransomware. We see this REPEATEDLY with many infections of large orgs. The basic story here is that something not editable has great value even if not perfectly current. If you do a diff every 4 hours you have covered a LOT of ground already. I've sat through continuous DR architecturing discussions - the massive cost / complexity / scale can just be out of control for many users. In many use cases Active Directory for example behind by 4 hours is not game ending. With notice to users that recent edits may not be captured you may be able to get back up and running pretty quickly.
  - rectang 5y ago
    I'm not singing the praises of "a USB in a drawer" — the medium doesn't matter, the number of copies doesn't matter. The only criteria I am considering is whether the backups are tested to prove that they actually work as intended. There are shades of gray, here: continuous restoration is a best practice, but backups which are tested even once, and perhaps incompletely, are better than backups which are never tested at all.
    - tempnow987 5y ago
      Many continuous restoration / HA systems are surprisingly vulnerable to hacks because the level of management / coordination is pretty high. They work well if datacenter 1 goes down and you want to get to datacenter 2. They work less well (in my view) if someone gets root. A fair number of public victims you read about actually DID have continuous backups / dr setups.
      - rectang 5y ago
        OK, but how about at least testing that that it's actually feasible to restore from that S3 bucket of yours? Verifying that restoration is possible once is better than not testing restoration at all. As for verifying restoration on an ongoing basis, if the attacker has root I suppose we can argue about the cost/benefit ratio but continuous backup validation doesn't hurt.