[LINK] Hacking of medical records

[Robert Brockway]

On Wed, 19 Dec 2012, Rachel Polanskis wrote:

> I will wear my backup admin's hat and say I have worked with medium 
> scale (300+) backup of mixed UNIX and MSW loads.  There is a complexity 
> in some of the products that makes total data recovery quite difficult, 
> in spite of all the considerations everyone has made.  The fact remains 
> that backup software scales only so much before you actually find 
> yourself investing more time and money in it than would seem worthwhile 
> or credible.

Hi Rachel. I agree to a point. I have quite a low opinion of a lot of 
'Enterprise ' backup software.  I often wonder whether the people who 
designed these packages had any experience with real world disaster 
recovery.

Really a lot of IT solutions being sold with big ticket priceses are 
overly complex and rigid.

I've designed DR solutions that scale very well but it does require 
planning and a willingness on the part of the client to step outside the 
comfort zone of certain big players in the industry with highly paid sales 
people and higher licensing costs.

This all ties in to my view that many (most?) IT systems are overly 
complex.  Designing a system is easy.  Designing a system that is only as 
complex as it needs to be takes more planning and thought.

I've done quite a few DRs over the years.  Back in 2007 I did a 10TB DR 
all on my own at a university after a SAN provided by a certain large 
corporation suffered multiple simultaneous controller failures.  Out of 
the 10TB, one small directory did not get recovered.  10TB was a bit more 
exciting in 2007 than now but it is still quite a bit of data and the 
solution I designed could scale well beyond that.

> This is not the first case of these ransom attacks, it has been going on 
> for years.  About 2 years ago an Alice Springs online betting site got 
> touched up for $20k or something and they used a DDOS to ruin his 
> business, rather than accessing and encrypting data on the system.

Yes DDoS against gambling and porn sites have been common for years. 
There's an argument (correct or not) that law enforcement respond more 
slowly when it is a gambling or porn site that is under attack.  Couple 
that with the high revenue loss for even short outages and it's a win-win 
for the extortionist :)

> Until people stop buying the stuff and expecting it to work on their 
> tiny LAN's as if it were an Enterprise, these attacks will continue, 
> Windows does not promote good security habits, it's default data

I agree.  The MS-centric security culture has been trailing *nix for a 
long time.  Behaviours, such as just 'running it as administrator' are 
sitll common in MS-Windows but haven't been common in *nix for a very long 
time.  Sorry if that sounds inflamitory but this is based on my 
observation of both cultures over a couple of decades.

Cheers,

Rob

-- 
Email: robert at timetraveller.org		Linux counter ID #16440
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"Information is a gas"