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Hacker Destroys Avsim.com, Along With Its Backups
el americano writes "Flight Simulator community website Avsim has experienced a total data loss after both of their online servers were hacked. The site's founder, Tom Allensworth, explained why 13 years of community developed terrains, skins, and mods will not be restored from backups: 'Some have asked whether or not we had back ups. Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day. Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our two servers. The hacker took out both servers, destroying our ability to use one or the other back up to remedy the situation.'"
To any sysadmins and DBAs...
Make sure you have offsite backups
"Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff ;)"
on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it
Linus Torvalds Jul 20 1996, 3:00 am
Remember kids if it isn't backed up to an off-line copy then it isn't backed up.
The [a href="http://16systems.com/zero.php"]Great Zero Challenge[/url] says otherwise. They're simply asking for the filename of one of the files on a drive that has been wiped once with zeros. Despite offering the challenge for over a year and actively speaking to data recovery companies, no one has taken them up on the offer.
Bleh!
So they had no real backup strategy....but what happened to them REALLY REALLY sucks. It really irks me seeing so many comments saying these "retards" had it coming to them.
Listen folks....we're talking about a couple of guys who spent their free time creating a website. They're not making any real money out of this (in fact, they all have regular day jobs).
They've been advertising for a Tech Manager (non-paid) for quite a quite so time now. They did get one recently...but it turns out the guy harvested the emails from the systems and sent out a bunch of spam. He has since been fired.Even though the avsim folks aren't saying it was him who hacked and destroyed their site, it's quite hard not to think it was him.
It's been quite a blow to the flightsim community and I have noticed a lot of IT folks are offering help.....I just haven't seen a single one on this thread.
A dedicated backup box can be much more hardened
What you've described is only marginally better than what these people did. A second server playing backup device, even if it's "much more hardened", whatever that means, is still an extremely lousy and ineffective backup. If lightening hits your building or arson or theft, your "it's hardened"! backup server is just as toasted as the primary. Backups MUST be to removable media that's kept off site and inactive.
Otherwise you've done practically the same thing for data "backup" as the RAID does via disks, except with two servers.
Tedious and expensive, but several people made a good living out of doing it (one guy I knew did it as a hobby and made over UKP100K one year.) However, as bits get smaller, servos get more accurate, and tracks get denser, the modus operandi just ceases to exist any more.
Mind you, for security reasons I always dismantle old drives and bend the disks in half using a lump hammer. That, and the fact that hard drive magnets are just incredibly useful if you have a steel hulled boat and want convenient attachments for e.g. cable ties. They are powerful and very short range, and usually nickel plated. To buy a pair of equally useful magnets from hardware stores costs nearly as much as a drive.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."