this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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I'm confused about protecting backups from ransomware. Online, people say that backups are the most critical aspect to recovering from a ransomware attack.

But how do you protect the backups themselves from becoming encrypted too? Is it simply a matter of having totally unique and secure credentials for the backup medium?

Like, if I had a Synology NAS as a backup for my production environment's shared storage, VM backups, etc, hooked up to the network via gigabit, what stops ransomware malware from encrypting that Synology too?

Thanks in advance for the feedback!

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[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Backups serve different purposes and if encryption by malware is a threat, you have to do backups differently, as opposed to, for example, hardware failure, where your NAS is a valid approach. To protect against encryption malware, you must make your backups inaccessible. One example are read-only backup media like DVD-ROMs. Another example is to make regular backups on tapes or HDDs and lock them up somewhere. You only take them out after you have wiped all computers that were affected by malware.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

What about simulated air gaps? So a backup system that turns off its own networking abilities once its done with the current backup and only turns its networking back on when it's ready to start backing up again?