Re: xkcd: CrowdStrike

On Fri, 2 Aug 2024 17:23:12 -0000 (UTC), Mike Van Pelt
<usenet@mikevanpelt.com> wrote:

In article <d44qaj1qpguo4ae3onpfi359hpp3823mj6@4ax.com>,
Paul S Person  <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

On Fri, 2 Aug 2024 16:41:48 -0000 (UTC), Mike Van Pelt
<usenet@mikevanpelt.com> wrote:

... it'll be "mass
ransomware attack and nobody will get their data back without
paying a billion to Putin's hacker brigades."

>
Backups are the key here. Daily backups, and to items unlikely to be
affected (provided the hackers ignore USB/WiFi drives) or (not daily
but not too ancient either) USB thumb drives that /are not attached to
any computer/ and so cannot be reached by the kernal, however hacked.
>
/Serious/ backups, that's what I am talking about.

>
Yeah.  Alas, too many backups turn out to have been accessible by
the miscreants, or the backup process turns out to be less useful
for producing actual backups that can be recovered from than you
would hope.

If I understand Microsoft's backup correctly, everying is on a single
attached drive in a format optimized for restoring prior versions
rather than copying the backup to another separate storage device and
then detaching that device.

The backup process needs to be verified to produce backups
usable for quickly restoring function, but this is very
rarely tested.

I occasionally test mine, usually when I have changed a file and need
to get the older version back.

This isn't the same as getting everything back, of course, but the
program I use (and probably others) allows a System Backup to be
mounted as a disk drive and explored. A problem with my laptop caused
me to to this and I can verify that the directory structure, at least,
was traversible. If it has to be done for real, just be sure that it
is a /copy/ of the System Backup that is being used, just in case. A
certain amount of paranoia is appropriate and helpful here.

And then there are those awful events where a full-scale test of the
backup is the /only/ way to recover the data after (say) re-installing
the OS or (even more fun) re-formatting the entire drive. Those always
worked for me provided, of course, that everything that needed to be
backed up was actually being backed up. But that is a matter of
configuring the backup tasks properly. And that is a battle between
safety and storage space for the backups.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"