Viruses

[Boaz Bezborodko]

> Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 01:25:19 +0000
> From: Richard Kreiss<rkreiss at gccconsulting.net>
> Subject: Ot: Viruses
> To:"filepro-list at lists.celestial.com"
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> One of my clients early Friday morning to advise me to stay off of their system.  They were being attacked by a virus that was encrypting or making unreadable a large list of Office type of documents and photo formats.  They eventually found the machine from which the virus infected their system.
>
> Luckily  filePro was not damaged by this attacked except for an old mdb file.
>
> They did have backups which were made to a NAS.  However even the files on the NAS were attacked.
>
> The suggestion I made to him, and it is not original with me, was to backup his system to the NAS and the backup the NAS to tape.  His comment to me was tape is old school.  My answer was that the tape would not have been attacked.  Yes, if he backed up on Friday it would have been infected files.  However, the backup for that day would not have been made.
>
> Just a suggestion.
>
> By the way, they are running Windows Defender and Malwarebytes, which missed the particular virus attacking their system.
>
>
> Richard Kreiss
> GCC Consulting
>
> Office: 410-653-2813

An NAS system on the network will just look like another drive and be 
accessible to the virus.  There are a number of ways to use an NAS 
device for backup that would secure it from access by a virus.

I've used one for a few years now that uses rsync to pull data off the 
server from a separate location.  I also use a script called 'rsnapshot' 
that creates separate directories for daily, weekly and monthly 
backups.  These directories are created using symlinks to the files so 
only the changed files have different copies.  This makes it very space 
efficient.  And being drive based it is very quick and easy to go get 
backup versions of a file.

I believe that the commercial backup companies like Mosi and Carbonite 
use this technology.

Boaz