This week we talk with Eric Jeffery, a cybersecurity SE and host of the Cyber Security Grey Beard podcast, and he is just a little miffed about how organizations are responding to cyber attacks today. It's not so much about how they respond to the attack itself; it's how they communicate what happened to the public – if at all. He's submitting what happened at the LA Unified School District as his case in point. He's a bit fired up, so this will be a fun one.

Imagine you're a small business or household that just lost everything in a fire, and your phones, ipads, and laptops went up in flames too. Where do you start? You've got a cloud-based password manager (e.g. Dashlane, OnePassword, KeyPass) and MFA system (e.g. Google Authenticator, Authy). How do you authenticate yourself with these systems if you have all new hardware? That's what we're talking about in this episode.

We reference this great previous episode about being prepared for disasters:

https://www.backupcentral.com/how-to-prepare-for-an-emergency-at-home-and-work/

There was a shocking article by Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal about how you are a simple bar trick away from losing access to all your photos (and some money) forever. All they need to do is steal your iPhone after seeing you type in your passcode, and they can lock you out of your account forever. 1. This is why we back up stuff and 2. There is a way to stop this. I'm not yet sure how vulnerable Android folks are to the same problem. If I've piqued your interest, this is the episode for you.

Here are two YouTube videos where the WSJ talks about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUYODQB_2wQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCfb9Wizq9Q

Have we got a packed episode for you.  This week in our continued Backup to Basics series, we dive deep into the various options for backing up and recovering databases, along with the pros and cons of each.  Want to figure out the best way to back up your traditional or modern database? This is your episode.  As usual, Mr. Backup and Prasanna also manage to make it fun. This is a great episode and we think you'll enjoy it. 

A few weeks ago, Mr. Backup (W. Curtis Preston) said he didn't understand why people used flash for backups. He said it was overkill. A few days later, Howard Marks of Vast (friend of the pod) took issue with that statement, and asked for the chance to defend Vast's title, so to speak. Howard is a friend of the pod and we were happy to say yes. We also take the opportunity to get an update on Vast, and discuss their data reduction techniques in more detail. Bonus points if you get the cover art reference.

Are you doing all you can to stop ransomware attacks before they happen, or kill them the moment they show up? Have you looked into this and found yourself swimming in alphabet soup (SIEM, SOAR, EDR, XDR)? Have you looked at some of these tools and found them to be prohibitively expensive or too complex? This is the episode for you. We have Dez Rock, CEO of SIEMonster, a SIEM/SOAR/XDR as a service company. She helps us weed our way through these acronyms, and then tells us about how SIEMonster (pronounced sea-monster) is bringing this important technology to companies of all sizes.

Last year LastPass suffered two hacks that left their customer's data exposed.  What can you learn from this event, even if you're not a LastPass customer?  We use this hack as an example of what your company should do (or not do) if it ever suffers such a hack.  We also talk about password managers, and what this hack means to those who use them.  You do use one, right?  This is a great episode, chock full of information.  We hope you enjoy it. 

It was a dark and stormy night in 1993 when paris (the database server) went down. It would be a night the new backup admin would never forget because he couldn't restore the database from backup. The only bright side of that very sad story is that it launched a career. Yes, that's the night W. Curtis Preston started his path toward Mr. Backup. Hear him tell the story in his own words, in the middle of the backup to basics series about backing up databases. Avoid the mistake that could have (but did not) cost him his job and enjoy a good episode while you're at it!

Are you backing up all the things you should be backing up? In this latest episode of our Backup to Basics series, Mr. Backup & Prasanna look at the list of the traditional things we think about backing up: servers, databases, laptops, mobile devices, file servers, virtualization servers, etc. The big question tackled in this episode is what of these things should you be backing up? Mr. Backup, of course, takes a pretty hard line about backup, but he may surprise you on some of his exceptions. We hope you enjoy the episode.

You know how we tell you to limit the amount of privilege each admin gets, in order to limit the blast radius if their account is compromised? What if you could apply that concept to applications that use private data to accomplish their task? We blindly give everything we have on each person to just about any app that needs anything. But if you had an app that only needs first name and email address, why not just give it that? And if it asks for more than that, what if you had a way to give it masked data, since it doesn't really need it anyway? That's how I would describe Sky Flow, a privacy as a service company, after interviewing its Head of Marketing, Sean Falconer. Fascinating new approach to the problem of personal data sprawl.