[LINK] McAfee update problem

[Stilgherrian]

On 24/04/2010, at 12:29 PM, Kim Holburn wrote:
> Enterprises can deal with this sort of thing.  They often have IT  
> staff, if they are any good they should be able to rebuild any system  
> fairly quickly, ie less than an hour.  It's small business and home  
> users who will be hit hard.

... because small businesses fail to put systems in place to recover from problems.

Ultimately, recovering from a configuration or patch failure is the same as recovering from a hard drive failure: You roll back to your last known-good backup. Being a small business isn't an excuse. Being in small business and not personally having IT skills is not an excuse either. If you don't have the skills to do things properly, you delegate to someone who does. If you ignore the advice of experienced and qualified people who recommend you need to plan for disaster recovery, then devil take the hindmost as far as I'm concerned.

Indeed, perhaps small businesses need to be extra careful about this stuff 'cos wiping out one or two computers could put them out of business entirely.

This is something on my mind especially this week 'cos the ACMA chair spent four months pfaffing around with a home network problem instead of just getting someone with a clue to fix it.

    http://delimiter.com.au/2010/04/21/oh-dear-acma-chiefs-broadband-nightmare/

(The short version is that badly-maintained networks are a hacker's playground, that the ACMA chair should know this, and know that it isn't the ISP's fault that he's burning through his download quota, and that on $400k a year he can afford to call in tech support.)

I did an op-ed for Crikey about this, but it's behind the paywall for another 2 weeks.

    http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/04/23/is-acma-chair%E2%80%99s-telco-hell-acceptable/

Plus I did an episode of the "Patch Monday" podcast specifically about backups for small business. It felt like I was repeating what's been said every year for the last thee decades -- well, maybe not quite, I did say "cloud" once or twice.

    http://www.zdnet.com.au/smbs-you-need-to-back-up-too-339302524.htm

Grrr.

Now growling at you, Kim, just at... well... the Moon.

Stil


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