“Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data
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@scottalanmiller said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
My guess is that some central thing was hacked. Like the password repository.
You mean something like LASTPASS can be hacked?! Oh the humanity!
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Basic system policy on any hosted platform, generally will require you (by default) to update your passwords regularly. And if you chose to disable that feature (or never change your passwords because you're too lazy) then all of the damage is on you.
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Now if he had any scale, he could have been using tapes even cheaper. But you have to have enough scale to get into them.
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LTO-8 supports up to 30T compressed storage per tape.
That's an insane amount of storage for what this provider likely has.
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@DustinB3403 said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
Basic system policy on any hosted platform, generally will require you (by default) to update your passwords regularly. And if you chose to disable that feature (or never change your passwords because you're too lazy) then all of the damage is on you.
That's actually a bad practice. Good practice is to not do that and be less lazy and disable insecure policies, follow the industry (and finally) NIST guidelines to low change but high security passwords, but to never share them.
We don't know anything about his password policies other than that he had passwords different on different machines. So it wasn't something like an AD breach where one password gives you everything. But that all systems were hacked suggests either that there was some central repo that was hit, or the systems were uniformally out of patching.
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@DustinB3403 said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
LTO-8 supports up to 30T compressed storage per tape.
That's an insane amount of storage for what this provider likely has.
Yeah, if he had ~3,000 paid accounts, then that would have been the way to go. Cheaper than Wasabi at that scale.
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@DustinB3403 said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
LTO-8 supports up to 30T compressed storage per tape.
That's an insane amount of storage for what this provider likely had.
Fixed a typo
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Basically if you are going to run a service of this nature, you probably want to build in the cost of immutable backups from the beginning. Just assume it is a required cost and build around it. Don't look at it years later and say "how do I afford this." You wouldn't say "SMTP costs too much, we will skip that", right? So the same with fully separate backups.
That said, if he had a central repository of passwords that was cracked as someone mentioned, they might have shut down any storage accounts elsewhere.
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@scottalanmiller said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
My guess is that some central thing was hacked. Like the password repository.
Compromised by a weak password or something, probably.
Hacked? Unlikely.
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@DustinB3403 said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
@scottalanmiller said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
My guess is that some central thing was hacked. Like the password repository.
You mean something like LASTPASS can be hacked?! Oh the humanity!
Never has been yet.
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@JaredBusch said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
@scottalanmiller said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
My guess is that some central thing was hacked. Like the password repository.
Compromised by a weak password or something, probably.
Hacked? Unlikely.
Depends. Might have been just a notepad or something.
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@scottalanmiller said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
@JaredBusch said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
@scottalanmiller said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
My guess is that some central thing was hacked. Like the password repository.
Compromised by a weak password or something, probably.
Hacked? Unlikely.
Depends. Might have been just a notepad or something.
That is not hacked, that is giving it away.
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Maybe it was a disgruntled former (or current) employee.
Anyway, what do you guys mean with offline backups?
Do you mean backups that are stored somewhere not connected to the net, like backup tapes in safe?For instance, in DBMS world "offline backup" is something completely different.
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@Pete-S said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
Maybe it was a disgruntled former (or current) employee.
Anyway, what do you guys mean with offline backups?
Do you mean backups that are stored somewhere not connected to the net, like backup tapes in safe?For instance, in DBMS world "offline backup" is something completely different.
An air gapped backup system, would have no connection (or credentials) to the production workload. Only during the time that a backup is being produced would there be some connectivity. IE An LTO tape is loaded and being written.
During all other time periods the Tape, the Controller, the credentials and everything that gets you "to the backups" are physically disconnected from everything else that is "production".
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The most basic explanation is that there is no physical connection to the backup medium.
In this case, there was a connection, and that the backups were not stored offline.
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@DustinB3403 But isn't then a tape library the only practical offline backup solution? And if you had the credentials to that, you could erase the tapes anyway.
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@Pete-S said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
@DustinB3403 But isn't then a tape library the only practical offline backup solution? And if you had the credentials to that, you could erase the tapes anyway.
No, not really. You can offload to rotating disks (Portable USBs for example), have detached offline storage providers and not keep the credentials in the same place as your production credentials.
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You could backup to a provider like AWS Glacier who, when your backup is done, literally takes the Tape out of the deck and stores it in a mountain.
There are options.
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@Pete-S said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
Maybe it was a disgruntled former (or current) employee.
Anyway, what do you guys mean with offline backups?
Do you mean backups that are stored somewhere not connected to the net, like backup tapes in safe?For instance, in DBMS world "offline backup" is something completely different.
Meaning something that cannot be connected to from the origin system.
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@Pete-S said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data:
@DustinB3403 But isn't then a tape library the only practical offline backup solution? And if you had the credentials to that, you could erase the tapes anyway.
Only if the tapes are physically inserted. Take the tape out and no password is going to reach it.
