We review and discuss Mark Dargin's Network World article "Credible threat: how to protect networks from ransomware." His article lays out several steps, each of which we discuss and expand upon: train your people, update your servers and apps, antivirus tools on endpointsm backup your data (of course), test your backups, and conduct vulnerability assessments (Pen tests).

Read the original article here: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3218708/how-to-protect-your-network-from-ransomware-attacks.html

We all know how important it is to verify your backups. But many companies simply lack the technical ability or time to do such a thing. Chris Marshall's company, VerifiedBackups.com to the rescue. They have a service that is aimed at companies with under 100 GB of SQL data. and will do an end-to-end verification of your SQL backups, guaranteeing that they are recoverable and safely stored offsite. I'm a fan of "as a service" anything, but this really takes the cake. Such an important thing to do, and he makes it happen.

Brian Greenberg and Cameron Laghaeian argue the point that individually encrypting each entity in a database storing personal information is the only true way to stop ransomware attacks that have exfiltrated data and threaten to release it. While Mr. Backup likes the idea, there was a pretty heated discussion on this episode, because he believes that doing this will roll back all advancements in backup in the last twenty years. Thanks to an olive branch from Cameron, though, they may have come to a hybrid solution that makes both sides happy. This is a great episode with heated discussion and good news for companies trying to protect themselves from ransomware attacks that include exfiltration of data.

In this privacy-themed podcast, we start with Apple's bombshell of a new feature, where they are scanning your pictures to see if you have any child porn on your Apple devices. While stopping child porn is a laudable goal, we discuss the privacy ramifications of this feature. We also discuss how Apple's iCloud backups aren't encrypted! The next topic is Luxembourg's huge $900M GDPR fine levied against Amazon for failure to get permission to track users. Then finally we discuss Prasanna's experience with using CCPA to find out how a company got his cell phone number. Spoiler alert: it's a sad ending. We then round out the podcast by discussing whether or not we need a more Federal response to privacy in the US.

Dave Lukens from Cockroach Labs joins us to discuss CochroachDB, a highly resilient SQL ACID-compliant database. We discuss the CAP theorum, which says you can choose any two from Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance – but you can't have all three. We talk about which two they chose, and why they believe they're the most resilient SQL database. We also, of course, discuss how you back this monster up! (We also discuss why it's named CockroachDB, and it's exactly what we thought!)

In this bonus episode of Restore it All, Mr. Backup talks BBQ! A few months ago, Curtis did a 15-stop BBQ tour of Texas, and made a series of youtube videos (https://www.youtube.com/wcpreston) about it. This is a bonus episode where Prasanna interviews him about his experience. If you have no interest in BBQ or beef, you can skip this one. Our regular episode will go live next Monday.

Subbiah Sundaram, VP of Products at HYCU, joins Mr. Backup and Prasanna Malaiyandi on the podcast to explain the evolution of the HYCU product line. They have expanded well beyond their original product that was aimed at Nutanix AHV. In addition to VMware, they've added support for Google Cloud Platform, Azure, Kubernetes, and Microsoft 365. They are also clearly focused on delivering their offerings as a service. We then have a very interesting discussion about the use of the multi-region object storage that Google Cloud offers.

Mr. Backup and Prasanna grill George Crump, CMO of StorOne, a software-defined storage company, about their product. We start with an overview, alon with George's claims about not needing backup... .then we challenge him on that topic. George used to be Curtis' boss, so this one's a fun one.

We are super excited to have the Emmy Winning sound mixer Larry Blake on the podcast to talk about his upcoming book "Solving The Digital Dilemma." It is a response to "The Digital Dilemma," which is a paper released in 2007 by the Academy's Sci-Tech Council that discusses long term archiving of a movie. (It describes a very NON-digital solution.) He has edited the sound on over 60 motion pictures, over 30 of which with Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh. This is both a very entertaining and very informative podcast about the about the art and science of archiving motion pictures.

Wolfgang Goerlich, Advisory CISO, explains the current state of information security, and why he thinks many environments are focusing on the wrong things. We speak about ransomware, extortionware, and phishing, even giving examples where we know we have personally been phished! He explains how this illustrates his point that we need more emphasis in different areas of information security.