31–40 of 51 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a friend who works at G that told me shortly after he started working there, he accidentally typed some portion of his password into another website, at which point his laptop immediately locked down and he was forced to change his password before doing anything else.
Are you implying Google had his password stored in reversible form?
I'm the only person in my company with any IT knowledge. I'm a developer, not an IT expert. These stories terrify me. I have no mandate or time to work on our security. What would you do to protect your company. I have limited backups but we would be done with systems down for days.
These stories terrify me.
I'm the only person in my company with any IT knowledge. I'm a developer, not an IT expert. These stories terrify me. I have no mandate or time to work on our security. What would you do to protect your company. I have limited backups but we would be done with systems down for days.
Please note that backups aren't a good measure against ransomware, unless you do them absolutely correctly. The problem is that ransomware will encrypt your files, rendering them useless, but they still end up in encrypted form in your backup.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please note that backups aren't a good measure against ransomware, unless you do them absolutely correctly. The problem is that ransomware will encrypt your files, rendering them useless, but they still end up in encrypted form in your backup.
Almost every backup system I've seen will keep multiple versions of the file around with decreasing frequency as time progresses, ie one for every day of last week, every sunday of the last month, the first of every month for the last year, etc. That way if you get hit by ransomware, you can restore to a point in time where you are (fairly) sure no infection was present yet. Nothing is perfect, but this does give a d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a friend who works at G that told me shortly after he started working there, he accidentally typed some portion of his password into another website, at which point his laptop immediately locked down and he was forced to change his password before doing anything else.
Are you implying Google had his password stored in reversible form?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't Garmin pay a ransom? Which is more well known?
Garmin more well known than Fuji?! In what world?!
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a friend who works at G that told me shortly after he started working there, he accidentally typed some portion of his password into another website, at which point his laptop immediately locked down and he was forced to change his password before doing anything else.
Are you implying Google had his password stored in reversible form?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/password-alert/noo...
And yes, it does store a hash of the password on the local machine, although I suspect it's only a 32 bit hash or something so you can't 'crack' it to recover the original password.
Their cloud storage is down, and ironically their ransomware protection service AirGap. https://datastorage-na.fujifilm.com/stop-ransomware/
Does anyone know the details of their AirGap service? Taking services/networks offline is common during incident response management so it might be indicative of them taking appropriate action rather than them being knocked off-line. Let’s hope their service lives up to the marketing.
I'm the only person in my company with any IT knowledge. I'm a developer, not an IT expert. These stories terrify me. I have no mandate or time to work on our security. What would you do to protect your company. I have limited backups but we would be done with systems down for days.
Report this to your manager and make it clear (using reports from cases, such as those ransomware cases) that you need to invest right away in security and a backup process you trust.
And this: https://www.usenix.org/system-administrators-code-ethics
I'm the only person in my company with any IT knowledge. I'm a developer, not an IT expert. These stories terrify me. I have no mandate or time to work on our security. What would you do to protect your company. I have limited backups but we would be done with systems down for days.
How big is the company? If the company is big enough then it should really have an infrastructure manager or similar who is directly responsible for this sort of thing, rather than relying on seconding the dev team into managing IT.
When we were a team of five plus the owner and I gave up on getting time+budget to properly setup off-site backups, I ended up spending a weekend hacking together something with ssh+rsync to the machine under my desk at home for key data (the source repos, email, etc.) basically replicating what I did for my home data (backing up to an external site). I can't recommend this. It no doubt breaks many data protection rules. But I wasn't comfortable with the idea that my job would be entirely gone if the building burned down overnight and we lost what would be needed to restore operation. I was protecting me, not the company at that point. Luckily when we were in the process of being bought and due diligence audits came around, backup & DR concerns were taken a bit more seriously and I did get the time allocated to do something better.
> I have limited backups but we would be done with systems down for days.
Make a case to management that these attacks are not targetted at the big companies, they just happen to catch them in the net and we hear about them because they are big companies. The bots out there infecting sites will get into anywhere they can, and the blackmailers are more than happy to have many small marks instead of a few big ones. You are a target as much as Fuji or Garmin are. That case should list how long it would take to get operational again (refreshed infrastructure, restored data) if you paid for decryption and if you didn't (which in your case might be "it'll never happen" currently). Make a recommended plan and list what the restore time is for that if you had to rebuild everything. Break the restore time into essentials (what you need to support current clients) and everything else (what you need to continue new work and chase new clients).
Also include in your plan time to regularly test your backups and arrange some automated tests of key parts.
That, other than taking matters into your own hands in your own time which is as likely to get you slapped as it is to get you thanked, is all you can do. If they don't take these matters seriously, consider if you can get a job with a company that does (you'll have to if the worst happens anyway so consider planning this to be your personal DR plan even if you don't want to jump ship now).