3 ms·

It's not that costly to hire a smart highschool kid to handle the basic security, such as backups and virus/malware prevention. It probably would have been enou

by kbart 12y ago

It's not that costly to hire a smart highschool kid to handle the basic security, such as backups and virus/malware prevention. It probably would have been enough in this case. Of course, such means won't protect against targeted attacks, but I doubt small town police departments are in a high risk of that anyway.

thaumaturgy 12y ago
Yeah, but they don't operate that way, and that's part of the problem. From their point of view, if anything goes wrong with whoever they hire to work on their infrastructure, they get excoriated by the public. That smart high school kid turns out to be fond of child porn? The department ends up in the state newspaper. So, they publish RFPs and select for established companies. The RFP publishing process isn't that great, so generally speaking there's a subset of companies that monitor for RFPs at various governmental levels, and those companies don't tend to be supplying the most cutting edge technology at the lowest prices. Then, to cover themselves, the departments require a stupid amount of paperwork and a carefully-prepared proposal that's supposed to establish firm costs on vague requirements, like, "cost per computer to provide hardware support for offices in the county". So, the businesses writing the proposals stuff pork all over the place so that they don't end up upside-down on the deal, and besides, they have to pay somebody just to sit and write up reports like these and fill out paperwork and supply background information and client references and attend social mixers and so on and so forth just to get the work in the first place. The entire process is not great, and it's the direct result of everyone just trying to watch out for their own best interests.
MichaelGG 12y ago
Do these programs lay in wait, hoping to wipe out all backups? Otherwise a weekly USB-drive backup would probably have been enough protection.
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  Please, don't call "manually copying files to a USB drive once a week" a "backup", that's something we have to educate people on and it's frustrating. I know you didn't mean it that way, I'm just trying to combat the spread of a bad idea. CryptoLocker doesn't lay in wait or try specifically to target backups. However, it will hit shared network drives; basically, anything that Windows has mounted as a drive letter at the time of infection can end up getting its files encrypted. (And I'm betting that's how the police department's file server was affected -- it wasn't the point of infection, it was just a shared network drive.) CryptoLocker bets on most Windows users not having reliable backups, and it's usually right. This is one area where Mac users often have no idea how good they have it; there is simply nothing in the Windows ecosystem that is as simple, reliable, and complete as Time Machine, at any price.
  - 1wd 12y ago
    What's the closest thing to a simple, reliable and complete backup system for Windows?
    - thaumaturgy 12y ago
      Acronis TrueImage. But, it's not totally reliable. We've recently seen it have trouble removing old backups from attached drives, so the drive fills up and then TrueImage stops running with little or no notice. It does this significantly less often than EaseUs ToDo Backup though. You can trade completeness for reliability by going with Backblaze or Carbonite or CrashPlan or SpiderOak for online backups. All of those offer a really good overall backup system, you just don't get a bare-metal restore and if you store files in an unusual location on your drive or use unknown file types, the backup service might not grab them.
    - tempestn 12y ago
      A combination of Crashplan, configured to backup all file types in any directory where you have irreplaceable files (generally your user folder should suffice), and a full disk imaging program. I use Macrium Reflect, as it's free and for me has been more reliable than Acronis. Run Crashplan continuously and image weekly or so. Even monthly would probably be fine, since Crashplan's incremental backups save you from any data loss. More frequent is just more convenient for restoration.
      - thaumaturgy 12y ago
        Your answer's better than mine, I kinda half-assed it. I don't know if Macrium made it into our last round of backup software evals, and we're overdue for another one anyway (and not terribly happy with Acronis). Anything about it you don't like?
        tempestn 12y ago
        Only that it doesn't support Acronis-style incremental images. So imaging takes more time and space. It also (last I checked) doesn't provide a way to automatically delete old images (but that's easy enough to script). It does do full images very quickly and reliability though, which is worth it for me. I tried for a long time to like Acronis. Even submitted several bug reports. But I had no end of problems, and even aside from the annoyance and wasted time, I don't want to trust a program with such quality control issues with my backups.

by kbart 12y ago

thaumaturgy 12y ago

Yeah, but they don't operate that way, and that's part of the problem. From their point of view, if anything goes wrong with whoever they hire to work on their infrastructure, they get excoriated by the public. That smart high school kid turns out to be fond of child porn? The department ends up in the state newspaper. So, they publish RFPs and select for established companies. The RFP publishing process isn't that great, so generally speaking there's a subset of companies that monitor for RFPs at various governmental levels, and those companies don't tend to be supplying the most cutting edge technology at the lowest prices. Then, to cover themselves, the departments require a stupid amount of paperwork and a carefully-prepared proposal that's supposed to establish firm costs on vague requirements, like, "cost per computer to provide hardware support for offices in the county". So, the businesses writing the proposals stuff pork all over the place so that they don't end up upside-down on the deal, and besides, they have to pay somebody just to sit and write up reports like these and fill out paperwork and supply background information and client references and attend social mixers and so on and so forth just to get the work in the first place. The entire process is not great, and it's the direct result of everyone just trying to watch out for their own best interests.

MichaelGG 12y ago

Do these programs lay in wait, hoping to wipe out all backups? Otherwise a weekly USB-drive backup would probably have been enough protection.

thaumaturgy 12y ago
Please, don't call "manually copying files to a USB drive once a week" a "backup", that's something we have to educate people on and it's frustrating. I know you didn't mean it that way, I'm just trying to combat the spread of a bad idea. CryptoLocker doesn't lay in wait or try specifically to target backups. However, it will hit shared network drives; basically, anything that Windows has mounted as a drive letter at the time of infection can end up getting its files encrypted. (And I'm betting that's how the police department's file server was affected -- it wasn't the point of infection, it was just a shared network drive.) CryptoLocker bets on most Windows users not having reliable backups, and it's usually right. This is one area where Mac users often have no idea how good they have it; there is simply nothing in the Windows ecosystem that is as simple, reliable, and complete as Time Machine, at any price.
- 1wd 12y ago
  What's the closest thing to a simple, reliable and complete backup system for Windows?
  - thaumaturgy 12y ago
    Acronis TrueImage. But, it's not totally reliable. We've recently seen it have trouble removing old backups from attached drives, so the drive fills up and then TrueImage stops running with little or no notice. It does this significantly less often than EaseUs ToDo Backup though. You can trade completeness for reliability by going with Backblaze or Carbonite or CrashPlan or SpiderOak for online backups. All of those offer a really good overall backup system, you just don't get a bare-metal restore and if you store files in an unusual location on your drive or use unknown file types, the backup service might not grab them.
  - tempestn 12y ago
    A combination of Crashplan, configured to backup all file types in any directory where you have irreplaceable files (generally your user folder should suffice), and a full disk imaging program. I use Macrium Reflect, as it's free and for me has been more reliable than Acronis. Run Crashplan continuously and image weekly or so. Even monthly would probably be fine, since Crashplan's incremental backups save you from any data loss. More frequent is just more convenient for restoration.
    - thaumaturgy 12y ago
      Your answer's better than mine, I kinda half-assed it. I don't know if Macrium made it into our last round of backup software evals, and we're overdue for another one anyway (and not terribly happy with Acronis). Anything about it you don't like?
      - tempestn 12y ago
        Only that it doesn't support Acronis-style incremental images. So imaging takes more time and space. It also (last I checked) doesn't provide a way to automatically delete old images (but that's easy enough to script). It does do full images very quickly and reliability though, which is worth it for me. I tried for a long time to like Acronis. Even submitted several bug reports. But I had no end of problems, and even aside from the annoyance and wasted time, I don't want to trust a program with such quality control issues with my backups.