The Trojan Fortune Cookie

A friend of mine who is also a client sent me an email this week. I get email all the time from friends and clients alike asking opinions on various technical things that they read about. I'm sure any of you in any kind of service industry whatsoever provide the same service for your family and friends - whether you are a neurologist (like my cousin), a cop (another cousin), a Pastor or a mechanic. People are always running their thoughts by you to get your opinions.

In any event, when I first read the article quoted below, I kind of had a chuckle. It's the kind of forward that people used to do by fax, sending them along the line to their friends. Since the tone is very alarmist, you have the urge to immediately make a tinfoil hat for each member of your family. You glance quickly to see if you know the person that originated the message, but no. You only know the person that forwarded it to you. 

Anyway, that was the first glance. I then had the opportunity of a long drive to give it some more consideration. My thoughts after the forward:

The Trojan Fortune Cookie

 It all started out simply enough, online backup. All your computer files will be securely down loaded onto a remote main frame computer. All your important financial, medical, company information would be properly encoded to keep it secure but readily available to replace the files when your computer crashed.

            Even more important as shown in 2009-2010,  Eastern European and mainland China probed and corrupted the files of businesses in Western Europe and United States.

             Threat and Solution. No one has noticed or been able to publicize that China based investors bought control of 87% of the online backup companies. The Chinese are investing in a business where they have created the market. They profit from the stolen information and profit from protecting the companies from their own attacks.  Everyone missed the point except the 1.3 Billion Chinese.

             It’s all in the numbers, Knowledge is Power.

 The computer users you are going to steal from, pay you to steal from you. You own the backup companies, billions of personal, financial, investment files. All that is needed is to sort for information they desire, sometimes financial weaknesses, sometimes personal peccadilloes’. 

             No one has understood that once you have all the information, you own them, their business and their country. 

 Next step in 2012 China will release the Ultimate virus and crash computers world wide, and eventually offer to sell back the “saved” files by offering a brilliant recovery program.

Alright, that's the forwarded note, and here are my thoughts. 

It is, of course, alarmist. That is not to say that you should dismiss everything in it just because it is alarmist. The forwarded article caused me to reconsider how backups are being done at several of my clients' sites not because I believed in the truth of the information but because in the process of debunking it in my mind I found some useful points in it. So what are the useful things that you can take away from this?

1. Don't trust a single source of backup. I have a friend that says that backups don't exist unless they exist in duplicate. Using this wisdom, there should be the source information and two backups of the data somewhere. This sounds a lot more expensive and complicated than it is.
2. Web based backups are not the only solution. Just one of the most convenient.
3. Understand where your data lives, and whether you would want it there. I'm not just talking about China here. The IT guy that has a backup server in his garage is probably not a safe place for your data. Ask questions about where your data is being stored and who has access to it.

The best backup solutions are the simplest. They are the ones that have the lowest probability of being forgotten or skipped because of their complexity. One of the most elegant answers to this was offered up by way of a tech podcast that I was listening to as I was driving and considering my clients' backup solutions. It's called the 3-2-1 rule, developed (as best as I can tell) at dpBestflow.org. Here's how it works:

• 3 copies of the data. One that you're working on, two others. This will happen pretty quickly because the data needs to be on at least...
• 2 different media types. One hard disk, one DVD. Or better yet, one hard disk and one web-based solution because...
• 1 backup needs to be offsite. 

And that's it, that's the 3-2-1 rule. Simple, elegant, very VERY do-able. Just about any external drive you purchase comes with software to write backups to it, then you can have a web-based backup program grab the files that are in your external hard drive and push them up to the "cloud". You may want to do this with only the most critical data, or you may want to post entire servers of data up there... It's your choice and your budget. It's not as expensive as you think, and it is certainly worth a look.