Hi all,

As self-hosting is not just “home-hosting” I guess this post should also be on-topic here.

Beginning of the year, bleeping-computers published an interesting post on the biggest cybersecurity stories of 2023.

Item 13 is an interesing one. (see URL of this post). Summary in short A Danish cloud-provider gets hit by a ransomware attack, encrypting not only the clients data, but also the backups.

For a user, this means that a senario where, not only your VM becomes unusable (virtual disk-storage is encrypted), but also the daily backups you made to the cloud-provider S3-storage is useless, might be not as far-fetches then what your think.

So … conclussion ??? If you have VMs at a cloud-provider and do daily backups, it might be usefull to actually get your storage for these backups from a different provider then the one where your house your VMs.

Anybody any ideas or remarks on this?

(*) https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/the-biggest-cybersecurity-and-cyberattack-stories-of-2023/

  • NAK@lemmy.worldEnglish
    322·
    1 year ago

    The real issue here is backups vs disaster recovery.

    Backups can live on the same network. Backups are there for the day to day things that can go wrong. A server disk is corrupted, a user accidentally deletes a file, those kinds of things.

    Disaster recovery is what happens when your primary platform is unavailable.

    Your cloud provider getting taken down is a disaster recovery situation. The entire thing is unavailable. At this point you’re accepting data loss and starting to spin up in your disaster recovery location.

    The fact they were hit by crypto is irrelevant. It could have been an earthquake, flooding, terrorist attack, or anything, but your primary data center was destroyed.

    Backups are not meant for that scenario. What you’re looking for is disaster recovery.

    • kristoff@infosec.pubOPEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Yes. Fair point.

      On the other hand, most of the disaster senarios you mention are solved by geographic redundancy: set up your backup // DRS storage in a datacenter far away from the primary service. A scenario where all services,in all datacenters managed by a could-provider are impacted is probably new.

      It is something that, considering the current geopolical situation we are now it, -and that I assume will only become worse- that we should better keep in the back of our mind.

      • Great Blue Heron@lemmy.caEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        It should be obvious from the context here, but you don’t just need geographic separation, you need “everything” separation. If you have all your data in the cloud, and you want disaster recovery capability, then you need at least two independent cloud providers.

    • kristoff@infosec.pubOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      The issue is not cloud vs self-hosted. The question is “who has technical control over all the servers involved”. If you would home-host a server and have a backup of that a network of your friend, if your username / password pops up on a infostealer-website, you will be equaly in problem!

  • Samsy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    Easy, I always mirror my cloud. My setting is: cloud is extern and in my network there is always the same copy of everything on a simple smb-nas.

    1. My house burns to the ground (or easier, the NAS is broken) = online backup

    2. The online provider got hacked = No problem, I have an backup at home.

    3. The hackers burned my house down at the same time they killed my cloud = Well fuck.

    PS. Since the most syncs are going directly to the cloud its just an rclone cronjob every night to backup everything on the NAS.

  • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    I’m more worried about what’s going to happen to all the self-hosters out there whenever Cloudflare changes their policy on DNS or their beloved free tunnels. People trust those companies too much. I also did at some point, until I got burned by DynDNS.

    • Z3k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      Indeed. The reaction from our customers was hilarious after our development team released a public statement stating we weren’t vulnerable to the big log4j exploit because the version they used was so old that feature didn’t exist yet

    • kristoff@infosec.pubOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      What was that saying again?

      “the biggest thread to the safety and cybersecurity of the citizens of a country … are managers who think that cybersecurity is just a number on an exellsheet”

      (I don’t know where I read this, but I think it really hits the nail on the head)

      • limonfiesta@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Security expenditures are just numbers on an Excel sheet, just like HR, and legal…it’s a business.

        You know what else is a big threat? Executives of cost-center departments not understanding how to articulate their needs in terms of profit, or profit loss.

        HR and legal departments are generally much better at explaining their concerns and needs in terms of profit, and not abstract concepts i.e. security.

    • kristoff@infosec.pubOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Well, based on advice of Samsy, take a backup of home-server network to a NAS on your home-network. (I do home that your server-segment and your home-segment are two seperated networks, no?) Or better, set up your NAS at a friend’s house (and require MFA or a hardware security-key to access it remotely)

    • dai@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      But man, I’ll be able to amend all those TODO items that have been accumulating of the last 12 months and fix all those issues while rebuilding my raid.

      I mean that’s only if my GITs aren’t hijacked during the ransomware attack.

      And I mean, I’ll probably just push the same config to my server and let it on its merry way again.

  • Septimaeus@infosec.pubEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Dammit, I came here hoping to see at least one “I have a very special set of skills.” Oh well.

    Yeah I’d cut bait, rebuild from latest tapes. But also…

    I’d put the corrupted backups in an eye-catching container, like a Lisa Frank backpack or Barbie lunchbox, to put on the wall in my office as a cautionary tale.

  • Nouveau_Burnswick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    A data cloud backup loss should be fine, because it’s a backup. Just re-up your local backup to a new cloud/second physical location, that’s the whole point of two.

    I don’t see a need to run two conccurent cloud backups.

    • kristoff@infosec.pubOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      In this case, it is not you -as a customer- that gets hacked, but it was the cloud-company itself. The randomware-gang encrypted the disks on server level, which impacted all the customers on every server of the cloud-provider.

      • Nouveau_Burnswick@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yeah absolutely, but tonyou as an individual , it’s the same net effect of your cloud backup is lost. Just re-up your local backup to a different cloud provider.