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How to survive a ransomware attack without paying the ransom

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Re: How to survive a ransomware attack without paying the ransom

#131

Post by m12k »

em-bee wrote: post #128
jeffbee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just having a decent and reasonable way to nuke and pave machines goes a long way. Most organizations don't have a good way to shoot a machine in the face and have it back up and serving in 2 minutes. Most organizations are absolutely married to "stateful services" like SQL databases with local storage, that are hard to kill, hard to restore, and give attackers a place to hang out. If you can take all your hosts down…

which company was it that randomly shot down machines in production to make sure the system would be resilient enough?

Sounds like the Netflix chaos engineering team

Re: How to survive a ransomware attack without paying the ransom

#132

Post by 0j »

balladeer wrote: post #125
Kenji wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile Garmin watches users (like me) are wondering how it is that syncing my watch that I have bought with an application on my smartphone that I have bought requires presence of some distant online service. You really wonder that? I'm sorry, how stupid are you? It's obviously to harvest data and control users. We've been warning and educating people about this for decades. When are you guys starting to wake up a…

Are there there similar but open and private solutions to Garmin/etc for h/w and Strava/RunKeeper/etc for software? Some solution where I can track my runs, swims, cyclings, treks just like Strava (et al) does does but I can choose to keep the data wherever I wish - local, or sync to an app on computer or to a self hosted server. Maybe not Garmin but I would love to use such an iOS Strava alternative with similar acc…

I wanted to recommend runalyze [1] but unfortunately they discontinued support of the self hosted version [2].

[1] https://runalyze.com/ [2] https://github.com/Runalyze/Runalyze/

Re: How to survive a ransomware attack without paying the ransom

#133

Post by snovv_crash »

rconti wrote: post #60
andrewcooke wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the garmin data actually is in an open format. i've written software to decode it using publicly available documentation. the software is free to use. you can copy the (.FIT) file off the watch over USB.

What about non-activity data, such as step counts, sleep data, pulse ox, etc?

That's all postprocessed from the raw data. And the raw data is in the .fit file.

Re: How to survive a ransomware attack without paying the ransom

#134

Post by russdill »

rectang wrote: post #67

> In other words, it’s less a question of how to stop hackers from breaking in than how to best survive the inevitable damage. There doesn't seem to be conventional wisdom about how to build systems that are easy to restore. How do you optimize for recovery after an attack? How do you ensure that you've eliminated all the backdoors? My guess is a combination of "continuous restoration", version controlled code, and a…

One of the things I loved when working at a large corp with military contracts. Anything fishy from any PC and the PC was gone. No notice to the employee, no waiting, no nothing. It was removed from the network, wiped, and reimaged as quickly as possible.

Re: How to survive a ransomware attack without paying the ransom

#135

Post by raverbashing »

user5994461 wrote: post #80
dzonga wrote: post #77

some of these companies, need to start suing microsoft. since it's usually windows affected by these malware attacks. if microsoft wants to keep serving the majority of the corp world, they need to have an os, based on user space system. i.e each program runs in it's own sandbox. and any data passed is via message passing.

Microsoft has pretty good security nowadays. It's the fault of companies for never upgrading their machines, giving full administrators access to every employee and using Admin123 as the domain administrator password account. If we believe the article, the virus came from an attachment in an email to a random employee. Why are executable attachments not blocked? Why is an executable running as an unprivileged user ab…

But did they? Were their machines updated? Did they have some "corporate AV" solution that was useless?

> Why are executable attachments not blocked?

Because there are dozens of weird Windows extension types that execute automatically on Windows, though yeah the attachment should have been blocked and a customer service machine should have a whitelist of programs that need to run (or only run signed ones)

Re: How to survive a ransomware attack without paying the ransom

#136

Post by terinjokes »

rapnie wrote: post #120
AlotOfReading wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the interests of making this somewhat productive, what open alternatives are there that we should be using? For instance, is there a commercially available, open source cycling computer that I can put my money towards? For a different industry, is there an open source e-reader I can support instead of Amazon/kobo/nook? Maybe I'm stupid as you say, but I genuinely don't know if these things are out there and a quic…

Some that I know of: - https://codeberg.org/jannis/FitoTrack - https://github.com/OpenTracksApp/OpenTracks - https://gadgetbridge.org/

None of those are cycling computers. They are applications that can, in some situations, replace cycling computers.

Hardware cycling computers, like the Garmin 830 or Wahoo Elemnt Roam, are physical hardware designed for the use case of being strapped to handlebars and being used in a wide range of environments. The battery life and performance is tuned towards always on GPS and Bluetooth for connecting to sensors. They utilize a wider range of GNSS constellations. They have physical buttons as touchscreens don't work well when wet. The screens are designed to be visible in sunlight.

Like the GP, I'm not aware of any open hardware cycling computers.

Re: How to survive a ransomware attack without paying the ransom

#137

Post by toxik »

em-bee wrote: post #128
jeffbee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just having a decent and reasonable way to nuke and pave machines goes a long way. Most organizations don't have a good way to shoot a machine in the face and have it back up and serving in 2 minutes. Most organizations are absolutely married to "stateful services" like SQL databases with local storage, that are hard to kill, hard to restore, and give attackers a place to hang out. If you can take all your hosts down…

which company was it that randomly shot down machines in production to make sure the system would be resilient enough?

Wrench monkey was an Amazon idea I think

Re: How to survive a ransomware attack without paying the ransom

#138

Post by sytelus »

Good story, bad title. There is no real lesson on how to survive ransomware except that company called Hydro was able to use employees to rebuild some of its data needed for running plants. Most companies deal with databases that cannot be similarly rebuilt in just days like that.

Re: How to survive a ransomware attack without paying the ransom

#139

Post by rckoepke »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #110
jvehent wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until this happens to your car...

This attack on Garmin has already grounded aeroplanes.

Has it? Private pilots are reporting no operational impact. Not sure if larger airplanes are somehow more impacted? https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/hx22o5/garmin_servi...

Re: How to survive a ransomware attack without paying the ransom

#140

Post by xwdv »

piokoch wrote: post #5

Garmin CEO at al must be reading this impatiently, looking for some clever-magic clue, which is not gonna arrive, I am afraid. Meanwhile Garmin watches users (like me) are wondering how it is that syncing my watch that I have bought with an application on my smartphone that I have bought requires presence of some distant online service. I can understand that some parts like "social" stuff might depend on some central…

Before this incident I was thinking about getting a Garmin, but now I think I’ll just wait for Apple Watch 6, which will probably be better in every way except battery life.
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