Russian hackers hold a casino site hostage!

An Costa Rican internet service provider's servers were recently taken hostage by an organized group of hackers located somewhere in Russia. The servers hosted internet gambling sites and despite all the precautions taken by the ISP, their 5 servers were comprimised and the hard drives encrypted, preventing any further revenue and a guaranteed quick business failure.

The Hackers kindly offered to unencrypt the server hard drives for an undisclosed amount of money (surprise!) and after exploring a few other options (I would too) the Casino owner decided to meet the ne'er do well'rs demands. The hackers did their part with the exception to the fifth server which held all the credit card numbers for the casino members. Apparently the hackers didn't read the encryption software instructions carefully enough and overlooked the required amount of hard disk space needed to encrypt the data! Get this...the hackers even spent about 8 hours trying to fix the problem! I wonder if they called tech support? They couldn't restore the 5th servers drives and I'd put money on it that they didn't apologize or offer a refund.

CBL, a Toronto based data recovery firm, recovered the data and the owner was back on a plane within 72 hours. Here's the video provided by CBL

Frankly I am amazed that an operation earning $135,000.00 per day doesn't have a better disaster recovery plan than the one that didn't work. On the other hand I see thsi quite often and most of the requests we get for backup are after a critical data loss event occurs,

Again, any backup is better than no backup at all and in this case I'm sure the casino is revising their disaster recovery plan to include a secondary server site or at least offsite data backup.

Remember to play the scenario to the end...what do you stand to lose if your Data suddenly becomes unavailable?

Here's the Video:

Protecting Your Data - The Basics!

Being a father, business owner, outdoor enthusiast and general digital packrat I find that the information I save to my hard drive is steadily increasing. Some of it I need to keep for long periods of time (maybe even for close to ever) and other stuff is project or research based and can be deleted after a period of time.

Why backup? I usually get the call after a client has lost some or all of their important personal or business related data. Data loss can be from accidental deletion, to a hard drive failure, to the loss/theft of a computer system. Yes, data can be recovered from a failed hard disk but sometimes the disk can be scratched and the more difficult it is to recover data the more expensive it gets! Theft usually means that someone else has your information and the chances of recovering it are slim to none. The number one method for ensuring that this doesn't happen to you is to back up your information on a regular basis.

Backing up your information can be in the form of: a portable hard drive, memory stick, CD/DVD, email, tape backup and online data backup. I've tried them all and the number one reason for not backing up is that other things became more important and it simply wasn't done. The solution for me was an automated secure offsite backup solution. Online backup works for me because basically I just set it and forget it. As with any backup its critical to make sure that your data is backing up and that the files you want to backup are selected for backup.

My main categories for backup are : Business and Personal; which include email, documents, pictures and video's, websites (source and current files), client information, web resource information, financial information web resources, favorites and a few other user specific categories.

Get backed up today with Datashield!