Hot answers tagged backup
20
I haven't thought through the details, but if a secure hash of the file content were used as the key then any (and only) clients who "knew the hash" would be able to access the content.
Essentially the cloud storage would act as a collective partial (very sparse, in fact) rainbow table for the hashing function, allowing it to be "reversed".
From the ...
19
The commercial ad you link to, and the company web site, are really short on information; and waving "20 patents" as a proof of competence is weird: patents do not prove that the technology is good, only that there are some people who staked a few thousand dollars on the idea that the technology will sell well.
Let's see if there is a way to make these ...
17
On-site storage
Fireproof safe/cabinet in a access controlled environment is often considered safe enough, It is manual labor to actually put the drives/tapes into the container. Example:
Attached fireproof media container. An example here is SentrySafe. A cheaper example is ioSafe.
Site redundancy. When you already have site redundancy for your ...
14
Bruce Schneier touched on the subject in May http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/05/dropbox_securit.html related to the Dropbox problem of that week. TechRepublic offers a great 7 page white paper on the subject for the price of an e-mail sign up at ...
12
Another one which causes more issues than you might expect is providing the backups with sufficient security. I have seen numerous instances where there was no protection of backups aside from being stored in a warehouse. This includes storing unencrypted customer account and password data!
It makes it very easy for attackers - okay, they need to go back ...
11
The most sensible approach is to assume you cant rely on their privacy - it isn't their responsibility, although there are some services whose selling point is securing this data.
If you take that stance, as long as you encrypt all data before it goes to the cloud you can be safe (decide on what level of encryption you need in order to be safe)
This ...
11
For the sake of having some fun, I'm going to answer this question exactly wrong. Just to get some practice in pointy haired boss thinking. If this isn't appreciated I have no doubt a moderator will delete it and threaten me.
First, have only one person responsible for backups, ever. This way when anything goes wrong you know who to blame.
Next, have ...
9
I certainly think it would be useful to mandate that devices are backed up in an encrypted format, if the reason for using local encryption is that you intend the data to be encrypted ;).
On the iPhone side, you would implement the security policy using Apple's iPhone Configuration Utility to create configuration profiles that control how the device is set ...
9
A backup, if there is one, takes time to get restored, if it can be. In other words:
Not every company has good backup practices. Considering that, as noted in the security investigation, UBS had other poor security practices it may not be surprising if they didn't have good backups.
Even if a backup has been made it takes time to restore. During this time ...
8
In addition to the other good answers here, I'd like to point you to the following two academic papers, which were published recently:
Martin Mulazzani, Sebastian Schrittwieser, Manuel Leithner, Markus Huber, and Edgar Weippl, Dark Clouds on the Horizon: Using Cloud Storage as Attack Vector and Online Slack Space, Usenix Security 2011.
This paper ...
7
I would say no its not suitable for storing criticial information,
From the sound of their terms Google essentially owns everyting you upload as well as anything derivitive of your data as well.
Here is an excerpt from the verge.com explaining the differences of the 3 major players, notice Google is very liberal with what they can do with your data.
...
7
Yes, it is very easy to retrieve data if you have the tape. The only challenge with older tapes is ensuring you have an appropriate reader. Once you have the reader you can easily work out what operating system and backup application write to the tape.
You must treat backups the same way you treat live data. If it is sensitive, use controls such as ...
7
Dropbox is compliant with the Data Protection Act, the main worry is point 8 of the Act:
Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory
outside the European Economic Area unless that country or territory
ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of
data subjects in relation to the processing of personal ...
7
Nothing can prevent physical items being stolen by a sufficiently determined adversary; even the British crown jewels have gone AWOL over the years, and they live in the Tower of London.
What mitigates the risk, for me, is encrypting my backups. Most enterprise-grade backup software, including the excellent bacula, allow the encryption of backups. Once ...
6
Current concern security wise is that there would be "data leaks" that would result from the sync tool being used; for example, the sync tool producing indexes that when be stored unencrypted on disk.
You are correct to believe there is a risk of data leaking as a result of indexes. How much of a risk that is depends on what exactly is indexed.
A while ...
6
The question is now "how can I do file level synchronization between two open TrueCrypt containers on a single host without any local leakage of data from the sync tool?".
The answer is you probably can't - certainly none of the well established file sync tools (unison, rsync, SyncToy, etc.) promise not to have such leaks. Their focus is purely on being ...
6
There's several reasons deletion of production data, especially by a malevolent sysadmin, will have a significant impact on a company - with or without backups:
Many companies don't do backups, or don't do them right. Without good backups, you may not ever be able to recover data that's been nuked by a sysadmin.
Companies that do have backups don't always ...
6
In the guise of one question, you're really needing the answer to two.
How should one physically protect backups from theft? Which is covered quite well already.
How should one protect the backups when they're stolen?
When building out your solution you should always assume that your physical protections will fail. Sometimes this can be due to a ...
5
You need just the most recent copy of the data, or a historic backup, like version control?
supposing you have two computers running linux (easier) or even any other OS that have the needed tools implemented and you want only the latest backup:
install SSH and create a tunnel between the two computers. You can choose to use the strongest key you need
...
5
Pragmatic advice. The best advice I can give you is not technical advice; it is organizational. You don't want to lose your jobs. That's understandable. The best way to meet that goal is, Don't try to do this yourself.
Your company almost certainly has an IT department. Contact them to ask them how they'd like you to secure your home PC and what ...
5
I'd say that the PCI compliance aspect is going to complicate things more than a little bit and that you should really speak to your QSA about requirements. Whilst I'm not a QSA it would seem to me that if you backup card data then that backup service would effectively become part of your cardholder data environment.
Apart from that one thing I always look ...
4
Consider this from an Information Management or Information Assurance question rather than an Information Protection question. To the question if a service provider's level of security is "safe" (sufficient and appropriate), the answer is YES and NO - depending on the level of protection the specific information requires.
My suggestion is you create three ...
4
As others have mentioned, general-purpose cloud storage providers, like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and DropBox are not completely safe, since although they encrypt your files, they have copies of the keys (needed so they can index your files for search purposes).
And as Rory points out, you can make this super-secure pretty easily: encrypt the backups ...
4
Woliveirajr covers a lot of good points. SSH makes for a very good, simple, hard to screw up backup tunnel.
In addition, you can make the SSH process only come online right before the backup process - no need to expose that attack vector during the rest of the day.
You haven't mentioned the size of the data you are backing up. If the data isn't too ...
4
Well depending it would be quite easy to start looking for stuff if you know what you are doing.
I'd make a binary copy of the tape on hard drive (for random access it would be faster).
I'd then use some forensic tools to go look for keywords like password, confidential, credit card, email address and guard the offset on the hard drive. Have a look at my ...
4
Encryption and de-duplication between arbitrary users are not compatible if you are concerned about distinguishing certain plaintexts. If you are not concerned about these types of attacks, then it can be safe.
If the data is only de-duplicated for a certain user, the server doesn't know anything about the equivalence of plaintexts and the attacks that ...
4
The same question was asked at the cryptography stack exchange. Please see my answer there, as there is a subtlety that is easy to overlook and that has been carefully analyzed by the Tahoe-LAFS open source project: http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/729/is-convergent-encryption-really-secure/758#758
4
If you really, reallyreally, reeheeeelly need those files - and I urge you to rethink that - defintely don't try to access them from a regular machine, but use a clean, throwaway machine you can load up on AV and forensic tools, and then trash it later. Make sure you're fully up to date, and running with minimal privileges. Run at least two AV scans on it, ...
4
There is an abundance of ways untrusted files could cause harm to your system.
One popular way to verify if any single file is malicious is to use Virus Total:
http://www.virustotal.com/
Virustotal is a service that analyzes suspicious files and URLs and facilitates the quick detection of viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by ...
4
Back it up using diff-based copying of the encrypted volume image. TrueCrypt uses XTS as its mode of operation, which means at most you'll alter two encrypted sectors (sector n and sector n+1) per unencrypted sector you modify. Every time you modify a sector (or file) on the disk, it'll just have to upload that sector and the next sector.
Sectors are 4096 ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
