The Backup Wrap-Up

Imagine you're a small business or household that just lost everything in a fire, and your phones, ipads, and laptops went up in flames too. Where do you start? You've got a cloud-based password manager (e.g. Dashlane, OnePassword, KeyPass) and MFA system (e.g. Google Authenticator, Authy). How do you authenticate yourself with these systems if you have all new hardware? That's what we're talking...

There was a shocking article by Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal about how you are a simple bar trick away from losing access to all your photos (and some money) forever. All they need to do is steal your iPhone after seeing you type in your passcode, and they can lock you out of your account forever. 1. This is why we back up stuff and 2. There is a way to stop this. I'm not yet sure how v...

Have we got a packed episode for you.  This week in our continued Backup to Basics series, we dive deep into the various options for backing up and recovering databases, along with the pros and cons of each.  Want to figure out the best way to back up your traditional or modern database? This is your episode.  As usual, Mr. Backup and Prasanna also manage to make it fun. This is a g...

A few weeks ago, Mr. Backup (W. Curtis Preston) said he didn't understand why people used flash for backups. He said it was overkill. A few days later, Howard Marks of Vast (friend of the pod) took issue with that statement, and asked for the chance to defend Vast's title, so to speak. Howard is a friend of the pod and we were happy to say yes. We also take the opportunity to get an update on Vast...

Are you doing all you can to stop ransomware attacks before they happen, or kill them the moment they show up? Have you looked into this and found yourself swimming in alphabet soup (SIEM, SOAR, EDR, XDR)? Have you looked at some of these tools and found them to be prohibitively expensive or too complex? This is the episode for you. We have Dez Rock, CEO of SIEMonster, a SIEM/SOAR/XDR as a service...

Last year LastPass suffered two hacks that left their customer's data exposed.  What can you learn from this event, even if you're not a LastPass customer?  We use this hack as an example of what your company should do (or not do) if it ever suffers such a hack.  We also talk about password managers, and what this hack means to those who use them.  You do use one, right? ...

It was a dark and stormy night in 1993 when paris (the database server) went down. It would be a night the new backup admin would never forget because he couldn't restore the database from backup. The only bright side of that very sad story is that it launched a career. Yes, that's the night W. Curtis Preston started his path toward Mr. Backup. Hear him tell the story in his own words, in the midd...

Are you backing up all the things you should be backing up? In this latest episode of our Backup to Basics series, Mr. Backup & Prasanna look at the list of the traditional things we think about backing up: servers, databases, laptops, mobile devices, file servers, virtualization servers, etc. The big question tackled in this episode is what of these things should you be backing up? Mr. Backup...

You know how we tell you to limit the amount of privilege each admin gets, in order to limit the blast radius if their account is compromised? What if you could apply that concept to applications that use private data to accomplish their task? We blindly give everything we have on each person to just about any app that needs anything. But if you had an app that only needs first name and email addr...

I was shocked to learn that my favorite password manager had a few known vulnerabilities, and you might be shocked too! We found this great research paper from the University of York, and invited one of the co-authors on to discuss it. Siamek Shahandasthi, an Associate Professor from the University of York, explained all the vulnerabilities discussed in the paper, and why each is important. I was...

In our latest episode of the Backup to Basics series, we talk about what I think is the most important invention in my career: deduplication. Without dedupe, much of what we do in backup and recovery, and disaster recovery, would simply not be possible. Without dedupe there really is no disk backup market; there is no cloud backup market. I'd be out of a job! What is dedupe, anyway, and how does i...

An incident response plan is the key to successfully surviving a ransomware attack, and it's a bit like Dramamine. The time to get one is too late to get one. @Vmiss (Melissa Palmer) joins us again to talk about this important topic. We talk about the important role cyber insurance companies can play in helping you find an IR team and helping you develop a plan. (They can actually force you to do...

We have talked about this a lot on the pod, and now we have someone that can explain what you actually do with your network when you get a ransomware attack. It's Tom Hollingsworth from Gestalt IT, and we're excited to have him on the pod. Some of his recommendations of course, require some configuration in advance. We talk about VLANs, SEIM and access management tools, and why many networking adm...

Sheltered Harbor is a non-profit organization dedicated to making sure financial organizations are able to recover after a cyber attack. Even if you're not a financial institution, there is a lot to learn hear. They've done a lot of work to make this standard practical in the real world. If nothing else, you can review what they ask orgs to do and see if you can apply it to your own environment. W...

Today we're visited by Scott McCrady, the CEO of Solcyber, a leading managed security service provider. He says they're changing the model of how small and medium-sized companies secure their infrastructure against attacks, without any of the typical upfront cost or ongoing maintenance hassles of traditional methods. Have you tried securing your environment, only to suffer "alert fatigue?" Scott f...

How great is it to discuss your favorite topics, learn something new, and have a great time all at the same time? That's what this episode is like. @vmiss (AKA Melissa Palmer) came on the pod for the first time this week. I've read a lot of her content and tweets over the years, and it was great to finally put a face to the name. She knows her stuff when it comes to security, since she was actuall...

We've talked a bit on this podcast about ransomware groups targeting Windows-based backup servers, and Veeam specifically . There's a new product on the market targeted at this problem, and it's called Blocky for Veeam from Grau Data. Today we have the founder & CEO of Grau Data, Herbert Grau, and their head of North American operations, David Cerf. What we didn't know until recording this epi...

LastPass made some serious blunders: how they responded to the hack in August, code they created before August, and how they configured their backup system. All of that came to a head at the end of 2023 when the hackers from August used stolen credentials to download a backed up copy of customer information. Most of it was encrypted, but they still gained a lot of information. Many are calling for...

Today (Jan 23) marks 30 years to the day that W. Curtis Preston joined the backup industry. Fresh out of the US Navy and wanting to make a name for himself, he joined MBNA, a 35-billion dollar credit card company as "the backup guy." Within seven years he would write the industry's first book dedicated to backup, and since that time, he's gone on to be the world's leading expert in backup and reco...

The latest in our Backup to Basics series is about making sure hackers don't delete, encrypt, or exfiltrate your backups as part of a ransomware attack. (Our Backup to Basics series reviews topics from Curtis' latest book Modern Data Protection, which you can download at druva.com/e-book .) We talk about how and why hackers are specifically targeting your backup system to either disable it or use...

Hear the incredible story of Albert Uy , who was handed a two-year project that had already wasted 18 months. They told him he had four months to complete it. He looked at that timeline and told them there was only one way he could do, by switching horses in mid-stream. Not only did they finish it in time; they finished it early. Albert has also managed backup teams for many years, so before we co...

Nothing but the best for our listeners! Curtis and Prasanna review their favorite episodes from 2022, from the time Curtis had to restore Backup Central to the shocking outage at Rackspace ( which is still ongoing!). This is your chance to catch up on what you missed last year as we prepare for a new year! Here are links to all the episodes discussed. Happy New Year! Mr. Backup Forced to Restore B...

Tomorrow marks two weeks from when the RackSpace outage started on Dec 2, 2022. They confirmed it was via a ransomware attack and it is not. going. well. We're going to do a deeper dive into this once it is all over, but this is a first-blush look at what is happening and RackSpace's reaction to it. When we recorded this episode, their reaction was not looking good. I'm sad to say it's gotten even...

Ok, so maybe not the most interesting topic. ;) But we promise you, this episode has a great story that involves Mr. Backup being kidnapped by a client, basically because he had a backup level issue. Learn about full backups, incrementals, cumulative incrementals, differentials, numbered levels, tower of hanoi backups, and why all this matters. It turns out it matters a lot more these days for str...

This episode we have Boris Agranovich, who has been a risk manager for decades, and speaks SIX languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Dutch, English, and Spanish). How amazing is that? He started the Global Risk Community, the largest online community for risk managers, and it's doing very well. We talk about the differences between what we do (as IT risk managers) and what he does, where he's man...