I.e. thoughts and questions on backups.
Continuing on from making my system secure against the most likely attacks etc. I need to make backups of the 'important' data.
Currently I backup from my main server system (the pre-update one at the moment) to a system on the home LAN in the garage. The garage is a fair way from the house so in the event of a serious disaster (e.g. a fire) it should survive. I also backup the *most* important files off-site to my account at my hosting provider.
At the moment these backups are 'pushed' from the main system, i.e. it is cron in that system that runs the backups. This requires that I have passwordless access to the destination system and here I see a hole! If a hacker got into my main system [s]he could immediately gain access to the backup destinations as well and destroy data there.
How can one overcome this issue? I can see a partial way around it for the LAN backups, I can remove the passwordless access to the system in the garage and change to a 'pull' backup that is run by cron on the garage system. The garage system can have passwordless access to the main system to enable this, there's no access through the firewall to the garage system so a hacker would need to guess the garage system passwords to get to it. This at least provides another layer of pretection against malicious attacks.
However I can see no way to pretect the off-site (across the internet) backups from similar attacks. If the shell account at my hosting provider was to have passwordless access to my home system that would lay me open to all sorts of malicious attacks so obviously that's not possible so I can't use the 'pull' backup from there. If I'm going to backup as at present the passwordless access to the off-site system needs to remain and therefore is open to a malicious attacker.
It occurs to me that I could *possibly* do the backups from the garage system to the off-site system, that would improve things somewhat.
How does the world at large do backups to remote systems without incurring security problems?
Chris G wrote:
Currently I backup from my main server system (the pre-update one at the moment) to a system on the home LAN in the garage.
Very often security is looked at entirely in technological terms and the obvious holes are missed. You know the sort of thing I mean: really secure passwords, written on post-it notes stuck to the monitor because nobody can remember them, credit card PINs kept in the purse with the credit card, posting to a publicly accessible and archived mailing list saying where all your secure data is kept, .....
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 11:27:48AM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
Chris G wrote:
Currently I backup from my main server system (the pre-update one at the moment) to a system on the home LAN in the garage.
Very often security is looked at entirely in technological terms and the obvious holes are missed. You know the sort of thing I mean: really secure passwords, written on post-it notes stuck to the monitor because nobody can remember them, credit card PINs kept in the purse with the credit card, posting to a publicly accessible and archived mailing list saying where all your secure data is kept, .....
Absolutely agree.
However (as I said in my original message) my 'secure data' has no value in itself, there's no gain to anyone stealing/accessing it. All I am trying to protect against is 'vandals' as it were.
.... and do you know *which* garage I was referring to? :-)
Chris G wrote:
However (as I said in my original message) my 'secure data' has no value in itself, there's no gain to anyone stealing/accessing it. All I am trying to protect against is 'vandals' as it were.
I thought it worth mentioning, just because I've seen people asking for help post config or log files which contain passwords and all sorts of things before. It's easy to forget that there are far more people reading this than you know about, and as one of them is Google...
At least these days the idea of having a signature with your home address in it, and messages along the lines of "I've just bought a fantastic XYZ for loads-a-money, can someone help me set it up when I get home from work (I'm out all day between the hours of x & y)....", seem to have died off. Although I suspect similar conversations happen in forums now instead.
.... and do you know *which* garage I was referring to? :-)
That would be telling :-)
Hi,
2008/11/25 Chris G cl@isbd.net:
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 11:27:48AM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
Chris G wrote:
Currently I backup from my main server system (the pre-update one at the moment) to a system on the home LAN in the garage.
credit card, posting to a publicly accessible and archived mailing list saying where all your secure data is kept, .....
However (as I said in my original message) my 'secure data' has no value in itself, there's no gain to anyone stealing/accessing it. All I am trying to protect against is 'vandals' as it were.
The data has immense value to *you*, otherwise you would not be worrying so much about making it secure. They are not "hackers". Stop perpetuating this incorrect label. Cyber criminals/vandals is the correct term.
.... and do you know *which* garage I was referring to? :-)
A determined criminal would be able to find out. Thus you have given them a slight advantage.
Thanks, Srdjan
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 11:58:29AM +0000, Srdjan Todorovic wrote:
Hi,
2008/11/25 Chris G cl@isbd.net:
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 11:27:48AM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
Chris G wrote:
Currently I backup from my main server system (the pre-update one at the moment) to a system on the home LAN in the garage.
credit card, posting to a publicly accessible and archived mailing list saying where all your secure data is kept, .....
However (as I said in my original message) my 'secure data' has no value in itself, there's no gain to anyone stealing/accessing it. All I am trying to protect against is 'vandals' as it were.
The data has immense value to *you*, otherwise you would not be worrying so much about making it secure. They are not "hackers". Stop perpetuating this incorrect label. Cyber criminals/vandals is the correct term.
I said 'vandals' didn't I? :-)
.... and do you know *which* garage I was referring to? :-)
A determined criminal would be able to find out. Thus you have given them a slight advantage.
I don't think I'm aiming to protect against 'determined' criminals, that was (some of) my point. Presumably a determined criminal is being paid in some shape or form by someone to whom my data is valuable. I can't think of anyone who would pay for the data on my machine(s).
On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:42:35 +0000 Chris G cl@isbd.net allegedly wrote:
.... and do you know *which* garage I was referring to? :-)
At a guess I'd say it is fairly close to here:
(Newbourne, Nr Ipswich, etc, etc. etc)
:-)
Mick ---------------------------------------------------------------------
The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 09:31:28PM +0000, mbm wrote:
On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:42:35 +0000 Chris G cl@isbd.net allegedly wrote:
.... and do you know *which* garage I was referring to? :-)
At a guess I'd say it is fairly close to here:
(Newbourne, Nr Ipswich, etc, etc. etc)
... and you've still got to guess which one!
-
Chris G -
Mark Rogers -
mbm -
Srdjan Todorovic