The Backup Wrap-Up

How to protect backups from ransomware starts with a hard truth: attackers aren't just encrypting your data anymore, they're stealing it first — and no backup system on earth undoes an exfiltration. In this encore episode of The Backup Wrap-Up, Curtis and Prasanna dig into what real immutability looks like versus the marketing version, why root access quietly undermines most "immutable" storage claims, the difference between virtual and true physical air gaps, and the exact questions you should be firing at your backup vendor before you trust them with your last line of defense.

This one's an encore for a reason — it was one of the most listened-to episodes in the show's history, with listeners sticking around for the full runtime and then some. That's the kind of signal that tells you it's worth a second run.

Along the way, they cover S3 object lock and what actually happens if your account gets deleted or your credit card stops working, why compromised admin credentials are involved in the majority of attacks and what your vendor should be able to undo, and why bit rot — rare, but nasty when it's silent — still belongs on your checklist. If you manage backup or DR for a living, or you're just trying to figure out whether your current setup would actually hold up, this episode gives you a concrete list of questions to ask and red flags to watch for.

Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open: Ransomware Is After Your Backups

01:19 – Welcome & Banter

05:50 – Topic Setup: Protecting Backups from Ransomware

07:36 – The Extortion & Exfiltration Playbook

15:25 – What Is an Air Gap?

18:22 – Virtual Air Gaps

27:57 – Real (Physical) Air Gaps

28:12 – What Is Immutability, Really?

29:23 – Bit Rot

30:42 – Root Access & the Limits of Immutability

32:51 – S3 Object Lock

40:20 – Questions to Ask Your Backup Vendor

42:31 – What Happens If You Delete Your Account?

44:29 – Compromised Credentials & Worst-Case Scenarios

46:41 – Final Thoughts

What is data deduplication, and why does Curtis call it the single most important development in backup over the last 30 years? In this encore episode, W. Curtis Preston and Prasanna Malaiyandi break down exactly how dedupe works, why it's not the same as compression, and why the fine print of your dedupe domain determines how much storage you actually save.

This episode originally aired as part of the Backup to Basics series, and it's back because listeners couldn't get enough of it — not just downloads, but people who stuck around for the whole conversation, some more than once. That says something, because this isn't a surface-level explainer. Curtis and Prasanna get into fingerprints, dedupe indexes, and the real-world tradeoffs between file-level and block-level dedupe.

You'll hear why Curtis argues that file-level dedupe isn't "real" dedupe at all, just single-instance storage wearing a costume. Then the conversation shifts to the split that shapes entire product categories: source-side dedupe versus target-side dedupe. Curtis walks through why source dedupe requires you to essentially replace your backup software, while target dedupe lets you bolt an appliance onto whatever you're already running. Prasanna pushes back on some of the assumptions along the way, which is exactly the kind of back-and-forth that made this episode stick with listeners the first time around.

By the end, they even get into hybrid dedupe, a concept that splits the difference and confuses almost everyone the first time they hear about it.

If you've ever wondered why your backup storage doesn't need to be 30 or 40 times the size of your production data, or you just want to finally understand what your backup vendor means when they throw around terms like "dedupe ratio," this is the episode that clears it up.

Chapters:

00:00 – Intro

08:10 – What Is Data Deduplication?

12:24 – Dedupe vs. Compression

16:13 – Fingerprints and the Dedupe Index

16:52 – What's a Dedupe Domain?

19:48 – Is File-Level Dedupe Really Dedupe?

21:53 – Source Dedupe vs. Target Dedupe

28:20 – What Is Hybrid Dedupe?

Phishing-resistant MFA could have stopped a Chinese state-sponsored threat actor from spending over a year inside North American academic and medical research networks — and we're going to tell you exactly how it happened and what you need to do about it.

A group called UNC5608, tracked by Google's Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), exploited a vulnerability unique to REDCap — a research data platform that allows multiple software versions to run simultaneously. They got in via stolen admin credentials, planted custom malware called Infinite.red directly into REDCap's upgrade process, harvested credentials for over a year, then used those credentials to log into Google Workspace as a domain admin and create fake compliance rules to silently forward sensitive research emails — military strategy, geostrategic policy, advanced tech, specific pathogens — straight to Gmail accounts they controlled. And nobody noticed for a very long time.

Prasanna and I break down the full attack chain, then walk through every prevention layer that could have stopped it: inventory management, patching, password hygiene, SSO, phishing-resistant MFA, passkeys, DBSC, context-aware access, compliance rule monitoring, credential separation across security domains, and logging. We also get into what backups can and can't do for you in a long-dwell-time attack like this — and why infrastructure-as-code and truly immutable golden images matter more than you might think.

If you're running any kind of research platform, academic institution, or medical network — or honestly any organization that uses Google Workspace — this one's for you.

Chapters:

00:00 — Intro: The attack that phishing-resistant MFA could have stopped

01:03 — Show intro & woodworking banter

03:26 — What is a living-off-the-land attack?

04:02 — Who is UNC5608 and who did they target?

05:08 — How REDCap's multi-version design was exploited

06:11 — Infinite.red malware and credential harvesting

09:01 — Google Workspace infiltration via fake compliance rules

10:18 — The keywords they were stealing: pathogens, military strategy, and more

11:50 — What could the victims have done differently?

12:42 — Inventory management, patching, and legacy version removal

14:00 — Why you can't trust application-level authentication alone — use SSO

15:18 — Phishing-resistant MFA and why it matters

16:00 — Passkeys, FIDO, and why there are zero known attacks against them

17:57 — Device-bound session credentials (DBSC) and context-aware access

19:38 — Monitor your compliance rules — have a compliance rule for the compliance rule

20:40 — Credential separation across security domains

23:00 — Get some logging — XDR, SIEM, and catching exfiltration in progress

24:00 — What can backups actually do in a long-dwell-time attack?

27:00 — Infrastructure-as-code and the right cyber recovery approach

28:58 — Protecting your golden images with immutable storage

31:59 — Wrap-up

California election fraud claims are flooding social media — and most of them fall apart under basic scrutiny. In this follow-up episode, longtime San Diego County poll worker W. Curtis Preston tackles the wave of viral fraud allegations head-on, with sources so you can check his work yourself.

Topics covered: the LA mayoral race "statistically impossible" surge for Nithya Raman, the AP reporting error that got blamed on fraud, claims that Spencer Pratt voters were having ballots rejected for signatures, the "gym membership card" voter ID myth, the Skid Row "paid to vote" controversy, and yes — the one claim that turned out to be true (a woman who actually did register her dog to vote).

If you've seen these claims and wondered whether there's anything to them, this episode walks through the actual data, the actual law, and the actual outcomes — no spin, just the facts from someone counting the votes.

Here are some sources:

Los Angeles 2026 Mayor primary results:

https://results.lavote.gov/#year=2026&election=4338

Donald Trump got 27% of City of LA vote in 2024:

https://xtown.la/2024/12/16/a-city-country-divide-more-than-70-percent-of-los-angeles-voters-picked-kamala-harris-for-president/

There were 12,700 rejected ballots in all of LA county:

https://perma.cc/E5Y9-NURQ

Orange County woman registered her dog:

https://www.foxla.com/news/costa-mesa-woman-dog-voter-fraud-sentencing

Heritage Foundation Voter Fraud Database:

https://electionfraud.heritage.org/search

California election counting has confused — and frankly ticked off — a lot of people, and I get it. I'm W. Curtis Preston, I've worked every California election since the 2016 presidential primary, and I've managed the polls at multiple elections here in San Diego County. This episode, I'm going solo to explain exactly what's going on, why it takes so long, what the "red mirage" actually is, and why none of it is fraud. Sorry to disappoint some of you.

If you've ever had a family member call you asking "what the hell is going on over there?" — this one's for you. I walk through the specific changes California made to election law, how our system compares to Florida's, why human nature is a big part of the problem, and what the chain of custody for every single ballot actually looks like from the inside. This isn't punditry. This is someone who has stood at those poll books, sealed those ballot cartons, and escorted those ballots to the DART team.

Chapters:

0:00 – Introduction: What the hell is going on in California?

1:23 – Who I am and why I can speak to this

2:12 – How California election law changed six years ago

4:43 – The mail ballot window: postmark by 8 PM, received within 7 days

5:09 – Vote centers vs. the old precinct model

7:39 – California vs. Florida: why the laws produce such different results

9:09 – Why California voters wait until the last minute

14:12 – The red mirage explained: it's not fraud, it's math

15:31 – Signature verification: 80,000–100,000 per day in San Diego alone

16:35 – How computers count ballots — and the 1% manual audit that checks them

19:11 – Chain of custody: two people, sealed cartons, tracked numbers

20:17 – Debunking the "law enforcement can't observe" myth

21:24 – Dead people voting? Let's talk about what's actually happening

22:47 – Wrap-up

Basic cyber hygiene — patch management, password management, and MFA — is responsible for stopping roughly 90% of the ransomware attacks that could hit your organization. This episode is the overview: what those three things are, why they matter, and what happens when you skip them.

WannaCry infected over 200,000 systems worldwide. A patch existed. People just hadn't applied it. Rackspace lost an entire business line — not because the attack was sophisticated, but because a workaround gave them false confidence and they delayed a critical patch. These aren't edge cases. They're the rule.

Dr. Mike Saylor (Black Swan Cybersecurity) and Prasanna Malaiyandi join me to walk through the three pillars of basic cyber hygiene. We cover patch management first — and before you can even patch, you have to know what you have. Inventory is the starting point. Then we get into passwords: why reusing them is a numbers game the bad guys always win, and why a password manager isn't optional anymore. Finally, MFA — what it is, which forms are actually worth using, and why "remember this device" is quietly defeating the whole point.

This is an overview episode. We're going deeper on each pillar in three follow-up episodes. But if you're not doing these three things today, stop reading this and go do them. There's no point talking about EDR, XDR, or any other three-letter security product if you haven't nailed the basics first. It's like researching a Roth IRA when you don't have a savings account.

Chapters:

0:00 Intro

0:59 Welcome & Introductions

4:20 WannaCry: The Patch That Would Have Saved 200,000 Systems

7:33 Rackspace: When a Workaround Isn't Enough

12:12 Defining Basic Cyber Hygiene

14:53 Why These Three Things Stop 90% of Ransomware

17:54 Pillar 1: Patch Management

23:55 Pillar 2: Password Management

31:55 Pillar 3: MFA & Passkeys

37:34 Wrap-Up & What's Next

Claude deletes a company — and the internet immediately blamed the AI. But this story is really about backup design, credential management, and least privilege. An AI coding agent running Claude via Cursor deleted PocketOS's entire production database and all its backups in nine seconds. One bad design decision at a time, a startup built itself a disaster waiting to happen. Claude just happened to be the thing that set it off.

Here's what you need to understand: the AI violated the principles it was given, and that's on Claude. But Claude never should have had access to do what it did. Credentials were sitting in a plain text YAML file. The production database and its backups lived on the same volume. No least privilege. No expiration on elevated permissions. And almost certainly, no backup recovery test — ever.

In this episode, Curtis and Prasanna break down what actually went wrong with PocketOS, what Railway did to help recover the data, and what you need to do to make sure this never happens to you. Topics covered include backup isolation, the 3-2-1 rule, secrets management tools like AWS Secrets Manager and HashiCorp Vault, least privilege access, permission expiration, and credential scanning tools like TruffleHog.

Chapters:

0:00 — Intro: Meet the villain

1:50 — Welcome and introducing "the French friend"

3:48 — What Claude actually did to PocketOS

7:20 — This is a backup story, not an AI story

9:27 — The recovery: Railway, a weekend of chaos, and a lucky Twitter post

12:31 — Your data is your responsibility — not your vendor's

17:48 — Rule #1: Never store backups inside production

20:37 — The real problem: credential management

23:38 — Secrets management tools explained

25:21 — Least privilege and why permissions need expiration dates

34:59 — Finding exposed credentials with TruffleHog

37:24 — Summary and takeaways

Honeypots and canary files are two of the most underused tools in cybersecurity — and in this episode, Dr. Mike Saylor and I break down exactly how they work and why you should be using them. The short version: they're tripwires. They tell you a bad guy is poking around your network before anything gets encrypted.

Mike walks through his layered security analogy, explains the three different ways organizations use honeypots — learning attacker tactics, distraction, and testing — and then we get into canary files: what makes them different from a honeypot, how they beacon home when stolen, and why clock synchronization matters more than most people think if you ever want that evidence to hold up.

We also cover how to stand one up without a big budget, what tools are available, and why something is absolutely better than nothing. Plus, Mike and I have news about our new O'Reilly book, Learning Ransomware Response and Recovery.

0:00 - Intro and book news

1:09 - Meet the crew

3:45 - Security is all about layers

9:22 - What are honeypots and canary files?

11:00 - Three ways honeypots work for you

13:17 - Real-world examples: bait cars and glitter bombs

15:20 - Making your honeypot convincing

19:11 - Honeypot tools and options

21:13 - Something is better than nothing

24:10 - Monitoring and notifications

25:05 - Canary files explained

27:03 - How canary files beacon and track attackers

28:03 - Don't forget to sync your clocks

29:05 - Final thoughts

Network segmentation to prevent ransomware isn't just a nice-to-have — the UCSF ransomware attack proves it's what separates a contained incident from a catastrophe. UCSF got hit. Their segmented network kept the damage from spreading across their entire operation. That's the difference we're talking about in this episode.

Dr. Mike Saylor — my co-author on Learning Ransomware Response and Recovery — joins me and Prasanna to break down exactly how network segmentation works, why it matters for ransomware defense, and how to start doing it without breaking everything in the process. (Not that I've ever done that. Much.)

We cover what segmentation actually is, how VLANs make it manageable, the "need to talk" principle, and where microsegmentation fits in — and when it becomes overkill. We also get into the complexity trap: more rules and more layers don't automatically mean more protection. Sometimes they mean nobody can troubleshoot anything when the house is on fire.

If you're an IT admin trying to make the case for better network architecture, or you just want to understand what would actually stop ransomware from ripping through your environment, this is the episode.

Chapters:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:01:40 — Welcome & Guest Introductions

00:05:17 — Case Study: UCSF Ransomware Attack

00:08:13 — What Is Network Segmentation?

00:12:32 — VLANs Explained

00:19:50 — The Need to Talk Principle

00:30:54 — Complexity vs. Security

00:31:09 — Microsegmentation

00:38:55 — Action Items: Where to Start

00:42:05 — Monitoring VLAN Traffic

Stop Using VSS as a Backup Before Ransomware Deletes Your Shadow Copies

Ransomware deletes shadow copies using your own built-in Windows tools against you — and if VSS was your backup plan, you just found out the hard way that it wasn't. In this episode, W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup), Prasanna Malaiyandi, and Dr. Mike Saylor break down exactly what shadow copies are, why they don't qualify as a real backup, and how attackers are weaponizing vssadmin to wipe your recovery options before you even know you're under attack.

If you've got Windows systems and you've been thinking "eh, we've got shadow copies," this episode is for you. We cover the history of VSS — what it was actually designed for, why it became a crutch, and why using it as your primary backup strategy is a bad idea on multiple levels. Performance, the 3-2-1 rule, and the fact that one attacker with admin rights can delete every single copy in seconds. We also get into the living off the land angle: how attackers do recon on your shadow copies, how they use them to scope out valuable data before going full ransomware, and what you can actually do to detect and respond to this behavior using EDR tools.

The bottom line: VSS is a great tool. It was just never meant to be your backup. Get a real one.

Chapters:

0:00 — Intro

1:39 — Welcome & Book Talk

3:26 — What Are Shadow Copies and Why Do People Use Them as Backups?

9:14 — Performance Problems with VSS as a Backup

10:19 — Living Off the Land: How Ransomware Uses VSS Against You

12:36 — Can You Monitor or Lock Down VSS Admin?

14:26 — Why Shadow Copies Fail the 3-2-1 Rule (They're Not a Backup)

18:01 — How to Protect Yourself: Configuring Your EDR

21:31 — The Local Admin Problem and Security Culture

27:00 — Virtualization, Snapshots, and Shadow Copies

29:00 — Final Thoughts: Just Don't Do That