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.

I was shocked to learn that my favorite password manager had a few known vulnerabilities, and you might be shocked too! We found this great research paper from the University of York, and invited one of the co-authors on to discuss it. Siamek Shahandasthi, an Associate Professor from the University of York, explained all the vulnerabilities discussed in the paper, and why each is important. I was able to verify that at least one is still found in my current password manager. How many are in yours? Let's pressure the companies to address these, shall we?

Check out the paper yourself here: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/158056/8/Revisiting_Security_Vulnerabilities_in_Commercial_Password_Managers_2.pdf

In our latest episode of the Backup to Basics series, we talk about what I think is the most important invention in my career: deduplication. Without dedupe, much of what we do in backup and recovery, and disaster recovery, would simply not be possible. Without dedupe there really is no disk backup market; there is no cloud backup market. I'd be out of a job! What is dedupe, anyway, and how does it work? What are the different kinds of dedupe and does that matter? You should learn a lot about this important topic.

An incident response plan is the key to successfully surviving a ransomware attack, and it's a bit like Dramamine. The time to get one is too late to get one. @Vmiss (Melissa Palmer) joins us again to talk about this important topic. We talk about the important role cyber insurance companies can play in helping you find an IR team and helping you develop a plan. (They can actually force you to do so in order to get coverage.) @vmiss was a blast to talk to again, and we're sure you'll enjoy this episode.

We have talked about this a lot on the pod, and now we have someone that can explain what you actually do with your network when you get a ransomware attack. It's Tom Hollingsworth from Gestalt IT, and we're excited to have him on the pod. Some of his recommendations of course, require some configuration in advance. We talk about VLANs, SEIM and access management tools, and why many networking admins are terrified of the "reject all" concept that would actually make your network much more resilient in an attack. There is some really good stuff in this episode.