Hackers Wipe US Servers of Email Provider VFEmail (zdnet.com)

Hackers have breached the severs of email provider VFEmail.net and wiped the data from all its US servers, destroying all US customers' data in the process. From a report: The attack took place yesterday, February 11, and was detected after the company's site and webmail client went down without notice. "At this time, the attacker has formatted all the disks on every server," the company said yesterday. "Every VM is lost. Every file server is lost, every backup server is lost. This was more than a multi-password via SSH exploit, and there was no ransom. Just attack and destroy," VFEmail said. The company's staff is now working to recover user emails, but as things stand right now, all data for US customers appears to have been deleted for good and gone into /dev/null.

Comments

There were NO offsite backups?????

[sconeu]

No offsite backups? No tapes????

Who designed the disaster plan for these guys?

Re:You mean just the online backup servers...

[bobbied]

Also, depending on how nasty they were being, they might have lurked long enough to poison the offline backups too. People tend to not actually check them till something goes wrong.

AND, when they check, some 70% turn out to be insufficient or not restorable. Most turn out to be nearly useless for anything but giving you a warm fuzzy feeling as you trot them off to offsite storage.

Having a backup plan is one thing, TESTING your backup plan is the next level.... However, revising your backup plan and TESTING your backups are restorable on a regular basis is the only way to know it will work when the chips are down. IF you don't do all this work, it's NOT really backed up, regardless of how many tapes you put into storage.