Backups are usually encrypted from most popular backup programs, either by default or as an option (restic, borg, duplicati, veeam, etc…). So that would take care of someone else getting their hands on your backup data.
I never store my actual files on a cloud service, only encrypted backups.
For local data on my devices, my laptop is encrypted with bitlocker, and my Android phone is by default. My desktop at home is not though.
Indeed. Whatever you put in a cloud needs backups. Not only at the cloud provider, but also “at home”.
There has been a case of a cloud provider shutting down a few months ago. The provider informed their customers, but only the accounting departments that were responsible for the payments. And several of those companies’ accounting departments did not really understand the message except for “needs no longer be paid”.
So for the rest of the company, the service went down hard after a grace period, when the provider deleted all customer files, including the backups…
The real issue here is backups vs disaster recovery.
Backups can live on the same network. Backups are there for the day to day things that can go wrong. A server disk is corrupted, a user accidentally deletes a file, those kinds of things.
Disaster recovery is what happens when your primary platform is unavailable.
Your cloud provider getting taken down is a disaster recovery situation. The entire thing is unavailable. At this point you’re accepting data loss and starting to spin up in your disaster recovery location.
The fact they were hit by crypto is irrelevant. It could have been an earthquake, flooding, terrorist attack, or anything, but your primary data center was destroyed.
Backups are not meant for that scenario. What you’re looking for is disaster recovery.
On the other hand, most of the disaster senarios you mention are solved by geographic redundancy: set up your backup // DRS storage in a datacenter far away from the primary service. A scenario where all services,in all datacenters managed by a could-provider are impacted is probably new.
It is something that, considering the current geopolical situation we are now it, -and that I assume will only become worse- that we should better keep in the back of our mind.
It should be obvious from the context here, but you don’t just need geographic separation, you need “everything” separation. If you have all your data in the cloud, and you want disaster recovery capability, then you need at least two independent cloud providers.
I have been looking into a way to copy files from our servers to our S3 backup-storage, without having the access-keys stored on the server. (as I think we can assume that will be one of the first thing the ransomware toolkits will be looking for).
Perhaps a script on a remote machine that initiate a ssh to the server and does a “s3cmd cp” with the keys entered from stdin ? Sofar, I have not found how to do this.
I’m more worried about what’s going to happen to all the self-hosters out there whenever Cloudflare changes their policy on DNS or their beloved free tunnels. People trust those companies too much. I also did at some point, until I got burned by DynDNS.
We start paying for static IPs. If cloudflare shuts down overnight, a lot of stuff stops working but no data is lost so we can get it back up with some work.
They’re just creating a situation where people forget how to do thing without a magic tunnel or whatever. We’ve seen this with other things, and a proof of this is the fact that you’re suggesting you’ll require a static IP while in fact you won’t.
Where I live, many ISPs tie public IPs to static IPs if they are using CG-NAT. But of course there are other options as well. My point was that the other options don’t disappear.
Though I do get the point that Cloudflare aren’t giving away something for nothing. The main reason to me is to get hobbiest using it so they start using it (on paid plans) in their work, or otherwise get people to upgrade to paid plans. However, the “give something away for free until they can’t live without it then force them to pay” model is pretty classic in tech by now.
However, the “give something away for free until they can’t live without it then force them to pay” model is pretty classic in tech by now.
Yes, this is a problem and a growing one, like a cancer. This new self-hosting and software development trends are essentially someone reconfiguring and mangling the development and sysadmin learning, tools and experience to the point people are required to spend more than ever for no absolute reason other than profits.
A data cloud backup loss should be fine, because it’s a backup. Just re-up your local backup to a new cloud/second physical location, that’s the whole point of two.
I don’t see a need to run two conccurent cloud backups.
In this case, it is not you -as a customer- that gets hacked, but it was the cloud-company itself. The randomware-gang encrypted the disks on server level, which impacted all the customers on every server of the cloud-provider.
Yeah absolutely, but tonyou as an individual , it’s the same net effect of your cloud backup is lost. Just re-up your local backup to a different cloud provider.
The issue is not cloud vs self-hosted. The question is “who has technical control over all the servers involved”. If you would home-host a server and have a backup of that a network of your friend, if your username / password pops up on a infostealer-website, you will be equaly in problem!
Well, the issue here is that your backup may be physically in a different location (which you can ask to host your S3 backup storage in a different datacenter then the VMs), if the servers themselfs on which the service (VMs or S3) is hosted is managed by the same technical entity, then a ransomware attack on that company can affect both services.
So, get S3 storage for your backups from a completely different company?
I just wonder to what degree this will impact the bandwidth-usage of your VM if -say- you do a complete backup of your every day to a host that will be comsidered as “of-premises”
if you backup your vm data to the same provider as you run your vm on you don’t have an ‘off-site’-backup, which is one criteria of the 3-2-1 backup rule.
Still sucks you will need a phone number to use it though. Hopefully they adopt meshnet type technology similar to berty.tech so people can communicate even when the internet is shut off across all platforms with end to end encryption
I believe they still require a phone number for the TESTING phase but it can be the same oje you already use for your regular Signal (if im understanding it correctly)
God I’m dyslexic af, I read it as Australia and I’m like why would anybody setup a pirated streaming service here and why wasn’t I using it… wasn’t until I read “arrests were made in Vienna, Lower Austria, Salzburg, Vorarlberg, and Tyrol” that I worked it out
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