Editor’s note: Wired for Safety is a column on cybersecurity and other tech issues. Duane Dunston is an assistant professor of cybersecurity and networking at Champlain College. He received his bachelor’s and master’s of science from Pfeiffer University. From 2001 to 2011 he worked in cybersecurity for NOAA. He is a doctoral student at Northeastern University with a concentration in Curriculum, Teaching, Learning, and Leadership. His other activities include “You Have A Voice,” a project to develop an electronic screening assessment to identify human trafficking victims.
[Y]ou may have heard about the large scale ransomware attack on the Norsk Hydro systems. I am highlighting this one because they are going to restore from backup.
You need to keep backups of your computer systems. Be sure you use some cloud service like SpiderOak or an external drive that gets taken off-site. In case of a natural disaster, theft or property damage, you’ll be able to resume your business operations fairly quickly with recent data. If you have an external drive plugged into your computer, then ensure both are plugged into a surge protector.
If you are not sure all of this is important, think about how much information you’d lose if all your computers at your place of business crashed and became unusable. Then think of how long it would take to get that information back to the same state before you lost it — employee records, inventory, payroll, accounting, customer contact information, emails, historical state and federal documents, legal contracts, client notes or your document archives. Jackson County, Georgia just paid $400,000 to get their data back. I hope they fix their security issues and not fall victim again when the criminals run low on cash.
SpiderOak is unique because your data is encrypted (unreadable without a password) before being stored on the company’s servers. Just don’t forget your password, because SpiderOak can’t help you.
One note about backup services involves the concept of syncing. This occurs when you make a change to a file on your local computer and it is updated automatically on the backup source. If your computer becomes infected with a virus like ransomware that encrypts your data, syncing could enable the virus to affect the backup copy as well. When a file is encrypted, the syncing software will detect that change and send the ransomware-encrypted file to the backup. That makes your backup files unusable too (unless you pay the ransom).
For this reason, a service like SpiderOak that allows you to restore older versions of files is ideal. The other option is to forgo syncing but perform backups on a nightly basis. The nightly backup is different because it is a new copy of all documents you specify each time the backup routine runs. This allows you to recover from a ransomware attack without having to pay the very high fees to get your files back.
Regardless of the cloud backup provider: 1) determine if your cloud provider helps protect against ransomware attacks with its backup solutions and 2) ensure your data is encrypted across the internet and while stored on their servers and they don’t have the master password.
Finally, periodically restore some files from your external backup source to ensure those can still be read — please! The files can be copied to a temporary location, then opened and deleted once you have verified those are still readable.
Third, if you use a point-of-sale system attached to a computer, don’t allow web surfing or emailing on that computer. Same for computers that have your QuickBooks or other financial software. If you are a mental health counselor, for example, and save notes about clients on a computer, I’d recommend that PC be used only for that purpose. It is worth the investment to purchase a new or used Chromebook or another PC for the sole purpose of storing your clients notes. Basically, use a separate computer from the one that has your sensitive data on it and don’t forget to backup that sensitive information.
Carbonite, SpiderOak, or an external drive (that is encrypted) just backup your data and test to be sure it can be restored in a readable format.
