I might add on to that. Keep it ready, and if it does get pushed to the cloud, keep the half-rack as a "disastrous recovery" [sic] site.

At the minimum, one can buy a small tape library (a single drive HP one that is 2-3U can store 300 TB, all encrypted, using LTO-6 tapes.) Add to this a 1U machine via a SAS card, and you now have archiving capability. A HP or Dell drive array is also 2-3Us, so add that onto the machine via your protocol of choice (SAS RAID 6), and now you have a place to stash critical data for long term backups. That way, if the cloud storage provider dies, you still have access to database dumps, old purchase orders [1], payroll records, and other critical info.

Even with the assurances of "we have 'passwords' and 'firewalls'" that cloud providers give, it is wise to have core company data in two physical (or realistically one physical, one logical) locations. Mainly because of the "all eggs in one basket" item. It is only a matter of time before some criminal organization hits a large cloud provider and dumps all the client data [2]. No large business trusts one data center completely, so why should one trust a cloud provider (which is likely just one data center, but might be without any oversight how it gets run.)

Other uses of that half-rack of space can be to have a VM farm. The drive array is changed out for a SAN with two drive controllers, a switch is added, and 1U servers using 10gigE iSCSI are put in. If density is an issue, an HP Moonshot can be tossed in for 45 blades in a 4.3U chassis [3]. That way, one may only have a half rack, but still be able to spin up plenty of VMs as scaled down critical hosts (be it AD DCs, Exchange replicas, database cluster nodes, and so on.)

Of course, this won't fit every situation, but if something happens to the cloud services, the half-rack can be used to keep the company limping along on the short term until things get restored.

Even after moving to the cloud, I'd keep that half-rack, if only as a place to archive data for the long term.

[1]: The receipts and POs will come in handy if the BSA comes a knocking and decides to demand an audit.

[2]: Could be for any reason. Any group who does cause a major, unrecoverable outage at a first name cloud provider will forever get their name on the map and in front page of the press, day after day.

[3]: The remaining 0.7 of a U can be plugged by one's method of choice in a hot/cold aisle. Plenum grade pipe insulation (which basically is a brown pool noodle that has a fire rating) is one way. The Moonshot is mainly for VDI, but when one is needing to replicate an entire enterprise's configuration on a scaled down basis, this is also a good use for this type of architecture.

I learned that lesson as well. However, I'm experimenting with aquaponics/aeroponics because it makes things less of a chore -- just add water and fertilizer to the tank, let the system take care of the rest, especially with a solar panel and timer.

Of course, gray water is useful (not on stuff you eat, of course) It is useful for keeping trees and such alive.

Similar with chickens. Done right a few hens that drop off eggs in the coop can be a good thing. Too many, and it can become a daily time-sink, especially if there isn't enough square-footage for them to forage.

I like having a major chunk of the lawn be a garden. A co-worker has turned his front yard into one that is extremely productive, with a couple solar panels, a timer, and some PVC pipe for aeroponics (which actually is pretty water thrifty.)

The ironic thing is that a lot of HOAs detest gardens... but when the food gets ripe, people there usually are the first who want the 100% organically grown items.

Since people pay for that front yard space, might as well make it productive. If not a garden, then maybe have a chicken coop and a few hens (no roosters, obviously) and have a source of usable protein from the eggs.

The ironic thing is this was done pre-WWII, with victory gardens. I don't get why more people don't do this.

I think AWS is the primary brand for cloud services, with Azure right on its heels, then other providers (Rackspace, etc.)

Amazon has some unique services that nobody else has. Glacier comes to mind for long term storage [1]. There are other services they provide which can be useful.

Amazon is not going anywhere... the shareholders may be unhappy right now... but it isn't like Amazon's market is drying up anytime soon. They are the only big company which can fight Wal-Mart and win on price alone. [2] If Amazon so chose, they could actually wage a battle on every front Apple is making money on, and actually make headway. Very few companies can do this.

Even if Amazon "failed", the cloud part would be spun off to a different entity. If not, because of all the critical data on AWS... Amazon almost certainly would receive a bailout, just like the car makers did.

[1]: Glacier is not going to replace a normal offsite volume anytime soon. The cost for uploading and storing is very reasonable. However, you do pay for accessing the data. If you use this for backups (I use it as the media of absolute last resort), it can be a useful tool.

[2]: This isn't a good thing with the race to the bottom, but a notable point.

IIRC, just a simple TRIM command can zap all data from a drive, no chance of recovery, no way, no how... and all modern operating systems constantly use TRIM to return freed up space to the SSD's controller.

I wonder how long it will be for a phone to take over the desktop role in a meaningful way (assuming a docking station). We have had some attempts at this, especially with the Motorola Atrix line (RIP) which were pretty good, although the best use (IMHO) was a Citrix receiver [1].

Already, we are seeing the tablet/desktop line blur, as Microsoft's Surface Pro [2] models get better. I wouldn't be surprised to see in a few years, a phone with 256-512 GB of SSD be usable in a docking station for basic desktop functionality, with USB 3.1 ports, maybe even Thunderbolt ports.

[1]: Would be nice to have a multiplatform F/OSS project comparable to Citrix Xen Desktop. No, VNC with its eight digit max password, does not count. X-windows over SSH is good, but doesn't play well with MS-Windows based items.

[2]: The Pro is the keyword... The plain old Surface is ARM based. The Pro is an X86-64 machine.

I wonder how many generations of ransomware we will see before backups come back into "style". It used to be in the '90s that people actively did some type of backups, and even PCs shipped with some form of tape drive. Then disks got cheap, and offsite storage become viable, so backups were not done, or if done, were just kicked to the cloud.

Any backup is better than none, but I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation of ransomware would either encrypt files slowly (but use a shim driver to decrypt stuff until it is done, and then completely zap all decryption keys and tell the user to pay up), or if it does notice a backup program being run, actively or passively corrupt it... or just erase the hard disk or the file share it is being backed up to. A simple TRIM command would make the data on a SSD unrecoverable. An overwrite of a directory synced with a cloud service will make that unrecoverable.

I wouldn't mind seeing tape come back, as it isn't slow, and it is relatively cheap (I've seen ads for LTO-6 tapes for $10 each.) The drives are pricy [1], but tapes are reliable [2], LTO4 and newer have AES-256 encryption in hardware (and very easy to turn on, be it by third party software, the tape silo's web page, or the backup utility.) A tape sitting on a shelf takes zero energy to store (other than HVAC), and if dropped, unless there is major physical damage, it is almost certain the media will be usable.

Will tape be 100% against malware? Nope. However, it keeps the data offline, so that a single "erase everything" command won't touch the data [3]. One can buy WORM tapes to protect against erasure/tampering as well, as well as flip a write protect tab.

In a ransomware scenario, WORM tapes would be very useful, especially if the malware decides to try to force an erase on all backups. The fact that tapes tend to be offline brings even more security since if the tape isn't physically in the drive, it can't be touched. Again, nothing is 100%, but the barrier for ransomware to destroy all backups goes a lot higher with offline media than with cloud storage or an external HDD.

I wouldn't mind seeing backups be done again, and done in a smart, time-tested way... done to local, archival grade media that is very inexpensive, but yet super reliable.

[1]: I think there is a market niche for USB3 tape drives at the consumer level. Newer drives have variable speeds to minimize/prevent "shoe-shining", and with all the space on a tape, if areal densities similar to HDD are present, it would store quite a lot of data, even with multiple layers of forward-ECC. LTO tape drives are even bootable so a bare metal restore can be done with just the tape in hand and the drive on the machine, no other media.

[2]: In the past decade at multiple IT shops, I've gone through thousands, possibly tens of thousands of LTO tapes. The total number of tapes that I introduced to the degausser were fewer than five, and all the errors thrown when read/written were all soft errors, so all data was recoverable. This is pure anecdotal evidence, but it has impressed me personally on the reliability of these drives. It is wise to have a backup process of rotating tapes and having some task just verify data when nothing else is going on, and goes without saying to use multiple media just in case hard read errors do happen.

[3]: One can tell a tape silo to zero out all tapes sitting in it, but that is going to take some time, and not be instant. It can be done... but if one has a basic offsite procedure in place (where all tapes leaving get the write protect tab sent), even this can be mitigated without much time and effort.

Tripwire/AIDE is passive. It can tell me if a binary is changed, but won't actively block a dropped script.

SELinux is great for assigning roles and denying execution in directories. However, it doesn't sign executables, nor keep a manifest in place.

AppArmor is similar to SELinux.

All of these are quite useful, but what would be an addition which would stop this type of Trojan cold would be something that checks an executable to see if it is on a manifest, checks its signature, then allows/denies/logs access. One can use -noexec flags and ACEs in SELinux for similar effect, but having a feature overlap wouldn't hurt.

Sometimes I wonder if Linux should have functionality similar to AIX's trustchk.

This command on AIX can make a list (signed with an OpenSSL key), then either warn when something runs that isn't on that list, or block it entirely. Functionality can be turned on to watch libraries as well, so if a library was changed, execution stops or a syslog entry is generated. In fact, it can be locked down so a reboot into another OS instance would be required to modify the trustchk settings.

If someone has static scripts that don't change often, this functionality would come in handy and would nip something creating scripts or executables on the fly almost immediately.

Even better would be to combine trustchk with BSD's securelevel so that a signed list of executables can be created, then locked down until the machine reboots.

It might be that if one uses a VPN, and a limited number of IP addresses, maybe just block everything except for those ranges, and the VPN (preferably a less known, but reliable provider, maybe even a static IP on a linode box) would allow one access if one wasn't on that range.

Of course, the attacks I see coming are often compromised Windows boxes on DSL or cable modem IP ranges, so blocking Elbonia directly may not help much. The best bang for buck is maybe blocking the obvious hotspots, then rate limiting dynamic IP pools.

I've wondered, at an extreme, having a custom sshd that had a list of IPs in place, and if someone connected from a blacklisted IP, it would randomly just deny them, or perhaps give them a fake shell before closing the connection. Of course, tarpitting can't hurt either, but a botnet only connecting 2-3 times from an IP at a time, that won't help much.

Another idea would be to combine it with port knocking so that the sshd would give bogus reponses to anything that connects unless it previously knocked on another port. Of course, this would be in combination with blacklists.

I use fail2ban and RSA keys as my primary login mechanism... but I also use the RFC 6238 TOTP tokens (Google Authenticator code available from git, or just fetch it from EPEL if on RedHat or a downstream distro like CentOS. For an app, one can use RedHat's FreeOTP, Google's app, Amazon's, or a slew of others.)

This isn't 100%, but two factor authentication should be the minimum standard for Internet communication these days.

After that, what may or may not help is the push to run everything in containers (think domains in Solaris, or WPARs in AIX.) Docker seems to have a lot of enterprise support, and it is relatively new, and that would put another layer of security in place.

This isn't to say malware can misbehave in a container. In fact, malware running in the user context on Windows can do a lot of mayhem. However, containers provide better defense in depth, same with SELinux.

A swimming pool noodle cut to fit works perfectly with gaps in the hot/cold aisles. Don't ask how I know...

The advantage of a even an easy-bump tumbler lock is that it requires physical presence to do that, with immediate risk (big dog waiting for his/her next meal behind the front door.)

The problem with these devices is that someone can be -anywhere- and break them. Done right, one button push from a script kiddie in Elbonia can unlock hundreds of thousands of deadbolts without warning, and no way for the perp to ever face consequences. This can be done either out of sheer malice, or perhaps extortion/blackmail against each and every user of the device, as well as the device maker.

Of course, if they have an easy mechanism to get flashed, that means an easy mechanism to get hacked, or perhaps bricked as well.

I can put packages down for a second while I stick my key in the lock. Fumbling for an app on my smartphone to unlock the deadbolt actually would take longer.

The problem is that there is an conflict between a password suitable enough for protection (i.e. 20+ characters), and something quick enough to access in a short time.

mSecure addresses this in an interesting way -- they cache the extra long sync password used for the cloud. The password that is used to encrypt the synchronized database that sits in iCloud or DropBox is different from the app's passphrase. Since most phones have decent innate protection, it is not impossible, but very difficult to dump the data on a locked device [1], so one can have a fairly easy to type in PIN on the device, but the synchronized backend file is protected with a much longer (and more secure) passphrase.

[1]: iOS on the iPhone 4 and up always encrypts. Android since 3.x has the option of using md-crypt and encrypting the /data partition, then using another tool to separate the password asked on boot to decrypt that partition from the screen locker password.

Done right, storing passwords on the web can be decently secure, especially if there is some part of the decryption key (be it a public key, a secondary authenticator, or a keyfile) that is not available to the attacker, in combination with the master passphrase.

I'd say the best implementation of this would be a utility that piggybacked on the cloud provider of choice, so one isn't limited to GDrive, Dropbox, Box, Skydrive, iCloud, or others. The utility would ask for permission just for its own directory (if possible), and would store its main DB file, as well as some backups in that directory. That way, the password program author or company doesn't have to maintain a cloud infrastructure.