Hi all,
As self-hosting is not just “home-hosting” I guess this post should also be on-topic here.
Beginning of the year, bleeping-computers published an interesting post on the biggest cybersecurity stories of 2023.
Item 13 is an interesing one. (see URL of this post). Summary in short A Danish cloud-provider gets hit by a ransomware attack, encrypting not only the clients data, but also the backups.
For a user, this means that a senario where, not only your VM becomes unusable (virtual disk-storage is encrypted), but also the daily backups you made to the cloud-provider S3-storage is useless, might be not as far-fetches then what your think.
So … conclussion ??? If you have VMs at a cloud-provider and do daily backups, it might be usefull to actually get your storage for these backups from a different provider then the one where your house your VMs.
Anybody any ideas or remarks on this?
haha
“the cloud” does not change the fact that if you data does not reside in 2 physical locations you do not have a backup.
so yes, standard practices that have existed… well, since the beginning, still apply.
Well, the issue here is that your backup may be physically in a different location (which you can ask to host your S3 backup storage in a different datacenter then the VMs), if the servers themselfs on which the service (VMs or S3) is hosted is managed by the same technical entity, then a ransomware attack on that company can affect both services.
So, get S3 storage for your backups from a completely different company?
I just wonder to what degree this will impact the bandwidth-usage of your VM if -say- you do a complete backup of your every day to a host that will be comsidered as “of-premises”
yeah, you can use another cloud provider as backup… if you do it correctly.
personally, my disaster recovery plans dont include entire offsite VMs. i only care about data in a dr situation. so you send incremental daily backups offsite.
containers have made VMs even more irrelevant/ephemeral so focus on the data.
I assume “data” includes your container configuration files in this strategy?
Its just some elses computer. Said this since the beginning
The issue is not cloud vs self-hosted. The question is “who has technical control over all the servers involved”. If you would home-host a server and have a backup of that a network of your friend, if your username / password pops up on a infostealer-website, you will be equaly in problem!
@kristoff Multicloud deployments is a thing, but far from common practice, I believe.
I will put “multicloud” on my wishlist.
Looking at it from a infosec point of view, cloud-providers are an ideal target. All the customers who have just lost all their data now complaining to the cloud-provider are the ideal pressure-mechanism to get the cloud-provider to pay out.
A data cloud backup loss should be fine, because it’s a backup. Just re-up your local backup to a new cloud/second physical location, that’s the whole point of two.
I don’t see a need to run two conccurent cloud backups.
In this case, it is not you -as a customer- that gets hacked, but it was the cloud-company itself. The randomware-gang encrypted the disks on server level, which impacted all the customers on every server of the cloud-provider.
I’m more worried about what’s going to happen to all the self-hosters out there whenever Cloudflare changes their policy on DNS or their beloved free tunnels. People trust those companies too much. I also did at some point, until I got burned by DynDNS.
We start paying for static IPs. If cloudflare shuts down overnight, a lot of stuff stops working but no data is lost so we can get it back up with some work.
They’re just creating a situation where people forget how to do thing without a magic tunnel or whatever. We’ve seen this with other things, and a proof of this is the fact that you’re suggesting you’ll require a static IP while in fact you won’t.
Where I live, many ISPs tie public IPs to static IPs if they are using CG-NAT. But of course there are other options as well. My point was that the other options don’t disappear.
Though I do get the point that Cloudflare aren’t giving away something for nothing. The main reason to me is to get hobbiest using it so they start using it (on paid plans) in their work, or otherwise get people to upgrade to paid plans. However, the “give something away for free until they can’t live without it then force them to pay” model is pretty classic in tech by now.
