Malicious hackers completely destroy flight sim site

Obligatory reminder:

Back up your system. Now. Automate your backup process.

That is all.

This is very sad news.

its main focus was on Microsoft's Flight Simulator. So this was a game review site, I had initially thought it was a place where you physically go (the false cockpit kind of training place).

Lesson: "Some have asked whether or not we had back ups. Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day. Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our two servers. "The hacker took out both servers, destroying our ability to use one or the other back up to remedy the situation."

They did backup - but the hacker (attacker) killed the backup server too.

How do you handle that? I mean, your server has to be able to write to the backup server - so the attacker can also.

It would need to be some sort of append only filesystem, and who does that?

I use ssh to copy the tar to a different server - remotely distant. Which I thought was enough, for fires in the datacenter, or going out of business without notice. But who protects backups from an attacker? With ssh they can attack the remote machine easily and remove the files.

Maybe I should add a cron on the remote machines to chown the files away (and hope that server also isn't vulnerable).

Pull, rather than push. (For instance, set up a cron script on your home PC to SSH into your production box and download a backup from time to time (rather than having your production box push a backup elsewhere).

    "Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our 
    two servers."

It sounds like two servers ran the site and backups were jsut swapped between the two, that is a hackneyed setup.

Besides, all it takes is burning the backups to DVD once every blue moon to prevent massive data loss.