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Re:Massachusetts Steamship Authority hit by ransomware attac... by WalterBright on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @06:04PM (#27374593)
An easy way to blunt such attacks is to have physical write-enable switches on drives used for backups. Then, when restoring from backup, it cannot get corrupted.

Of course, even better would be a physical switch for incremental backups, so a disk drive works like tape - it can physically only be appended to if that switch is "off".

Come on, security professionals. None of this has any technical or cost barriers. Demand it from drive vendors. My older drives have such a switch.

Re:Massachusetts Steamship Authority hit by ransomware attac... by VectorLock on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @08:27PM (#27375710)
This isn't "our backups need to be WORM."

This is "there are no backups."

Re:Massachusetts Steamship Authority hit by ransomware attac... by WalterBright on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @06:15PM (#27374712)
Anticipate a problem with your IT staff leaving the write-enable switch on? Have the drive maker add a (again, physical) clock circuit (could just be an RC delay) to turn it off again automatically.

(Even if you don't anticipate a problem with your IT staff, it's just good engineering to automatically turn off the write-enable. Nobody's perfect. I've gone to the airport without my passport once. It really sux when you do that.)

Re:Massachusetts Steamship Authority hit by ransomware attac... by willcipriano on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @06:27PM (#27374820)
This is a system I put together at my first IT job.

Backups get pushed from devices between 1AM and 3AM each day, so the primary backup server enables it's network card at 1 and disables it at 3.

Primary backup server also has a second network card, that in turn is attached to a small subnet containing it and the secondary backup server only. The secondary backup server pulls a copy from the primary on a weekly basis in a similar manner as the primary, disabling it's network card once it has finished.

Maybe they can hit the primary if the infection takes place overnight, but the odds of getting the secondary are pretty low.

Re:Massachusetts Steamship Authority hit by ransomware attac... by WalterBright on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @07:49PM (#27375430)
The odds of hitting the secondary are zero if you've got a hardware write enable switch!

One thing you could do is get one of those mechanical lamp timer clocks from the hardware store, and have it turn the power on/off the network card on schedule.

Re:Massachusetts Steamship Authority hit by ransomware attac... by mjevans on Thursday June 03, 2021 @02:36AM (#27377890)
I am now seeing a grandma style light timer device used to turn off and on a cheep switch.
Re:Massachusetts Steamship Authority hit by ransomware attac... by WalterBright on Thursday June 03, 2021 @05:30AM (#27378883)
Oh you could find an expensive way to do it, but the idea is the same.