It's been quite a while since the OP was updated. What's the most effective antivirus folks are recommending these days?
I run a double AV solution - Webroot (which I pay for), and Immunet, (which is free). I know the tech behind immunet very well, and I trust it. So far, that combination works for me.
immunet seems interesting, but it's one of those things that seems like there is a catch. is there a reason you run conventional AV alongside that solution?
In short, sometime ago, someone figured out the light on-disk presence is optimal, and outsourcing the signatures to the 'cloud', gained increase efficiency that makes downloading a .dat file somewhat silly. Maybe Immunet was first - not sure there, but I can tell you this: Even if other companies copied that model, do you know who wins? He who has the biggest version of it - the goal here is to 'see' as much as you can see with malware on the Internet. The more you 'see', the better the efficacy of your coverage. So that way, if a guy seems some shady stuff in Bucharest, and it stops it in real time (as it should), then you in Seattle, should be nice and safe based on the engine inspection and it going to the cloud as 'malicious', and the only thing that traverses the cloud is the SHA256, which your end point client should have damn near instantly.
I can't reveal how I know it - I have to mindful of what I share on the Internet, but I can tell you this: Immunet's back-end is utterly vast. Something like 1.6 million unique malware samples a day, and every time someone installs it or a paid version of it (called AMP, which is for businesses), that net grows a little more. Economies of scale work to it's favor is what i'm saying.
So the 'catch', I guess, is that by installing it, if you flag something bad or nasty, that bad or nasty thing gets anonymously shared with a cloud of other bad things (the SHA really). Honestly, I struggle to find a downside. And it's meant to run along side traditional AV, so, you know, shore up your defenses.
Edit: Wait, I don't think I answered you question. The reason I run both is because detection isn't universal. Most SHA conviction schemes are automated - that's an industry standard, there's way too much bad stuff for most human eyes to parse out. So, giving a glitch in matrix, I double up. I've had stuff pass Webroot and Immunet catch. So far, Immunet's been the better bet, but you can't be too sure these days.
That's a pretty comprehensive answer and it makes sense. Have you encountered any problems with each AV infighting? The nature of some AV is o function not unlike a rootkit so naturally they don't play well with each other.
That's a pretty comprehensive answer and it makes sense. Have you encountered any problems with each AV infighting? The nature of some AV is o function not unlike a rootkit so naturally they don't play well with each other.
Personally, no, but it's not unheard of at least as of 2015-16. I don't know if they're working to cross purposes per say, so I don't want to speculate. Most AV's won't flag other AV's as malicious and/or misbehave on purpose, but it could very well be one of those "Do at your own risk" kind of things. I do know that Immunet is specifically designed to run along and compliment traditional AV, but I can't tell if that's the norm vs. it's competitors, as there are way more products for malware than I've personally touched.
Given my industry and role, I should be more active in this thread, heh. If you got other questions, now's the time. Hit me with anything, and if I can answer, I will.
The guy who originally found the killswitch that stopped the first wave of WannaCry has been arrested in Las Vegas for having played a role in developing and releasing a ransomware trojan of his own back in 2014/2015.
Similar to the previous question about anti-virus, anyone know of any freeware or open-source software firewalls for Windows that are good? I've been using Comodo for a while but I fucking hate it now. Keeps being bundled with more shit you don't want and have to uninstall, I had to manually update version 8 to 10 because their updater didn't work, and generally they have just made me despise the software.
If you're on Win10, I don't know of any software solution that is notably better than the built-in firewall.
If it isn't sufficient for your needs, you probably need to be building a pfSense router/firewall to sit on your network or some similar dedicated solution.
The Win10 Firewall is pretty legit. If you wanna go super lock-down mode, you'll be going down a much deeper rabbit of hole of installing sensors and firewalls on separate hardware. I know plenty of people who do that, but we're a strict and paranoid lot in this business.
I'm on Windows 7. I like the software firewall because I can easily choose which programs I wanna block on a case-by-case basis. I've thought about a hardware solution, but it seems overkill
My PC has locked up 3 times the last few days (except the mouse) and Immunet was recently installed. Wondering if they don't play nice eventually. It was fine the first day, I think, so this may be unrelated but I kind of hope it's that and not <something else>....
My PC has locked up 3 times the last few days (except the mouse) and Immunet was recently installed. Wondering if they don't play nice eventually. It was fine the first day, I think, so this may be unrelated but I kind of hope it's that and not <something else>....
Avira, no, I run webroot. Have you checked Windows event viewer? What's the critical error/stop code? I don't do support for Immunet or anything, but they do have forums you can search against for problems. http://support.immunet.com/
as a heads up it seems virustotal has changed their page layout. i just kinda absentmindedly autofilled and had a minor heart attack when the page didnt look right
My PC has locked up 3 times the last few days (except the mouse) and Immunet was recently installed. Wondering if they don't play nice eventually. It was fine the first day, I think, so this may be unrelated but I kind of hope it's that and not <something else>....
Avira, no, I run webroot. Have you checked Windows event viewer? What's the critical error/stop code? I don't do support for Immunet or anything, but they do have forums you can search against for problems. http://support.immunet.com/
Event viewer just shows kernel-power from my having to hard shutdown the PC to get it to reboot.
First 2 times it happened it was when a game was running and my FPS got worse and worse than everything locks up (except the mouse cursor). Third time was after rebooting from the 2nd. Today after removing Immunet it hasn't done it again so far, but may be a coincidence as it wasn't constant or anything.
That was my understanding, but above it was said Immunet was designed to do so. So I gave it a try. It may well have been fine (but so far no problems since I removed it).
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
I've been running Immunet and Kaspersky together, and haven't had any problems.
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TetraNitroCubaneThe DjinneratorAt the bottom of a bottleRegistered Userregular
Equifax, a provider of consumer credit reports, said it experienced a data breach affecting as many as 143 million US people after criminals exploited a vulnerability on its website. The US population is about 324 million people, so that's about 44 percent of its population.
The data exposed in the hack includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers. The hackers also accessed credit card numbers for 209,000 US consumers and dispute documents with personal identifying information for about 182,000 US people.
I don't even know how one is supposed to respond to this. Equifax has set up a website to "check" if you are impacted by this, but it looks sketchy as hell (particularly via whois) and only returns a "We'll get back to you/Check Back Later" response to anyone who uses it.
A credit freeze is unlikely to be helpful to the 44% of the US population who just lost their social security number.
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
They also currently have no intention of attempting to contact those affected. This doesn't surprise me because Equifax is a garbage company. The best part of all of this is they may have your personal information even if you've never utilized their services yourself, because maintaining databases of people's personal information without their consent is kinda their business model.
Edit: They are offering one whole year of credit monitoring to anyone affected. Bonus: Accepting the offer waives your right to legal action concerning the hack.
LD50 on
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TetraNitroCubaneThe DjinneratorAt the bottom of a bottleRegistered Userregular
People are reporting that putting fake information into the "credit monitoring" form returns the same result as putting in legit information. It's also asking for WAY more information than is reasonable, so I would be especially wary of using whatever form this is that they've directed people to.
Yeah, this is bad. Like really bad. Like if corporations are people this one should be given the death penalty bad. I'm surprised this sort of thing didn't happen sooner though. Although I figured it would be LexisNexis. The laws in the U.S. on this sort of thing are so far behind. And they got in through the website. Damn, did they forget to check for SQL injection? That's like penetration testing 101.
Number technicalities aside, this affects probably closer to 2/3 of the adult population in the US.
I'm actually debating putting a fraud alert on my profile at all 3 bureaus because of this. My credit was already frozen but I'm not naive enough to think I wasn't still affected.
The SSN implication means that fraudulent tax returns are going to spike for this tax year.
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TetraNitroCubaneThe DjinneratorAt the bottom of a bottleRegistered Userregular
edited September 2017
With address, birthday, and SSN information all compromised, this breach means that people are going to have problems that go well beyond what a credit freeze can help.
If you do choose to sign up for the credit monitoring service, you must agree to submit any complaints against Equifax to arbitration. You can't sue on your own behalf, and you can't join a class-action case or benefit from any class-action settlement that Equifax agrees to.
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DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
Also the WHOIS entry for the site doesn't match the info for Equifax proper so yeah.
Different, but absolutely legit according to equifax.
The fact that they're requesting/collecting such sensitive personal information (more SSN digits than necessary) on a Wordpress site doesn't engender confidence.
Even if it's completely legit, using that site is still a terrible idea. Particularly after they've already proven their lack of trustworthiness.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
In other security news, Best Buy no longer sells Kaspersky products as of around five hours ago. All products pulled, and Geek Squad agents no longer use their tools. We had no idea it was coming, I just had to turn in my software and make new copies as soon as I got off the road today.
Would backup, sync, and off-site cloud storage be under the purview of the security thread? I didn't find any other threads on the topic.
For the interested:
I'm looking to get a cloud backup service. I haven't gotten one before, so I'm wondering what kinds of systems people have set up for different needs. In list form:
I'm backing up a few large projects (mainly 2d game projects)
But it's mostly documents, photos, Steam saves, and smaller web dev projects. Nothing huge like movies.
I don't currently need to back up my wife's computer (she mostly has her stuff backed up on github), but having the option without needing an account upgrade would be helpful
I have a few files I would like to sync between devices (like OBS settings)
File versioning is not necessary, but it would be a big plus.
My target is a 5USD / month backup solution supplemented with whatever free solutions I need, but I could consider up to 10USD / month for a more convenient all-in-one system.
I'm assuming the best arrangement would be to have a local backup from our laptops and other devices to the HTPC, then use something like Backblaze to take the off-site backup of those folders.
Edit: mega bonus points for clients that can handle cloud backup, sync, and local backup all in one.
Would backup, sync, and off-site cloud storage be under the purview of the security thread? I didn't find any other threads on the topic.
For the interested:
I'm looking to get a cloud backup service. I haven't gotten one before, so I'm wondering what kinds of systems people have set up for different needs. In list form:
I'm backing up a few large projects (mainly 2d game projects)
But it's mostly documents, photos, Steam saves, and smaller web dev projects. Nothing huge like movies.
I don't currently need to back up my wife's computer (she mostly has her stuff backed up on github), but having the option without needing an account upgrade would be helpful
I have a few files I would like to sync between devices (like OBS settings)
File versioning is not necessary, but it would be a big plus.
My target is a 5USD / month backup solution supplemented with whatever free solutions I need, but I could consider up to 10USD / month for a more convenient all-in-one system.
I'm assuming the best arrangement would be to have a local backup from our laptops and other devices to the HTPC, then use something like Backblaze to take the off-site backup of those folders.
Edit: mega bonus points for clients that can handle cloud backup, sync, and local backup all in one.
Thoughts? Recommendations?
I touch on some of the companies in the spoiler.
Since crashplan is pulling out of the consumer market, either BackBlaze or Carbonite.
Similarities:
Both will encrypt locally and transmit.
Both do 'cloud' back-up and sync from a single node really well.
Both are about USD$4.50 to USD$5.00 per month.
Both provide a decent UX on the local node, and at their website.
Neither of these companies provides a local syncing platform because their business model is per-node. You'll have to set cron jobs or scheduled tasks, or use some open source data sync'er, to move the data off of the laptops and other devices to the HTPC.
Differences (these are ones that I think are important, your needs might not align with mine):
Encrpytion
To provide cloud access through their websites, the private key (used to encrypt locally before transmitting) is stored on their server, as well as on the node. This means that the private key was transmitted at some point during setup. This is a point of failure for any of the services that want to let you access your data on their remote server as it creates a chance for a bad actor to siphon your key when it is transmitted.
The difference is in how they let you take control of the key management process:
Carbonite will give you the option to manage your keys locally. Meaning they're not transmitted to the Carbonite servers. The downside is that if you lose this key, there is literally nothing, short of a catastrophic breach of the encryption algorithm, that Carbonite can do to decrypt your data. This is helpful with minimizing the impact of well funded actors from getting your stuff.
Backblaze lets you enter a passphrase (password) that is then used to encrypt the key. This is less ideal because you still have to transmit something across the internet. In this case, you're transmitting two things so the odds go down, but it's likely not going to be as secure as just not transmitting the key at all.
Back-Up Defaults
BackBlaze will back-up everything with a few pre-defined exclusions. This is great if you don't want to always manage the folders that get backed up. However it means you'll have to manage the folders you don't want backed up (e.g., the telemetry data that windows 10 generates in AppData/Local, AppData/Roaming, Program Data/, or other caches; think firefox browsing caches, even when in private-mode).
Carbonite seems to take the opposite approach and only backup folders that were selected for backup. This is great if you won't want unintentional usage data about you existing on yet another server, but it's very sad if you forgot to white list a folder or folders from an application you just installed.
As always, none of these back-up services are doing data corruption detection/correction - these services are only for catastrophic device failure. If you're paranoid about bit-rot of your files, you'll need to have yet another piece of software that, at a minimum, runs bit-flip detection (checksum) so you can be warned early enough to restore a corrupted file from back-up before the corrupted file becomes the only backed up copy.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
Best Buy pushed Kaspersky so damn hard that they nearly turned into Clippy from Word.
Eh, that depends on the store. My home store pushes Webroot hard because it's so much more lightweight than the other options. Kaspersky was always the one we had to fight with to fix, though it was usually issues with Safe Money.
Would backup, sync, and off-site cloud storage be under the purview of the security thread? I didn't find any other threads on the topic.
For the interested:
I'm looking to get a cloud backup service. I haven't gotten one before, so I'm wondering what kinds of systems people have set up for different needs. In list form:
I'm backing up a few large projects (mainly 2d game projects)
But it's mostly documents, photos, Steam saves, and smaller web dev projects. Nothing huge like movies.
I don't currently need to back up my wife's computer (she mostly has her stuff backed up on github), but having the option without needing an account upgrade would be helpful
I have a few files I would like to sync between devices (like OBS settings)
File versioning is not necessary, but it would be a big plus.
My target is a 5USD / month backup solution supplemented with whatever free solutions I need, but I could consider up to 10USD / month for a more convenient all-in-one system.
I'm assuming the best arrangement would be to have a local backup from our laptops and other devices to the HTPC, then use something like Backblaze to take the off-site backup of those folders.
Edit: mega bonus points for clients that can handle cloud backup, sync, and local backup all in one.
Thoughts? Recommendations?
I touch on some of the companies in the spoiler.
Since crashplan is pulling out of the consumer market, either BackBlaze or Carbonite.
Similarities:
Both will encrypt locally and transmit.
Both do 'cloud' back-up and sync from a single node really well.
Both are about USD$4.50 to USD$5.00 per month.
Both provide a decent UX on the local node, and at their website.
Neither of these companies provides a local syncing platform because their business model is per-node. You'll have to set cron jobs or scheduled tasks, or use some open source data sync'er, to move the data off of the laptops and other devices to the HTPC.
Differences (these are ones that I think are important, your needs might not align with mine):
Encrpytion
To provide cloud access through their websites, the private key (used to encrypt locally before transmitting) is stored on their server, as well as on the node. This means that the private key was transmitted at some point during setup. This is a point of failure for any of the services that want to let you access your data on their remote server as it creates a chance for a bad actor to siphon your key when it is transmitted.
The difference is in how they let you take control of the key management process:
Carbonite will give you the option to manage your keys locally. Meaning they're not transmitted to the Carbonite servers. The downside is that if you lose this key, there is literally nothing, short of a catastrophic breach of the encryption algorithm, that Carbonite can do to decrypt your data. This is helpful with minimizing the impact of well funded actors from getting your stuff.
Backblaze lets you enter a passphrase (password) that is then used to encrypt the key. This is less ideal because you still have to transmit something across the internet. In this case, you're transmitting two things so the odds go down, but it's likely not going to be as secure as just not transmitting the key at all.
Back-Up Defaults
BackBlaze will back-up everything with a few pre-defined exclusions. This is great if you don't want to always manage the folders that get backed up. However it means you'll have to manage the folders you don't want backed up (e.g., the telemetry data that windows 10 generates in AppData/Local, AppData/Roaming, Program Data/, or other caches; think firefox browsing caches, even when in private-mode).
Carbonite seems to take the opposite approach and only backup folders that were selected for backup. This is great if you won't want unintentional usage data about you existing on yet another server, but it's very sad if you forgot to white list a folder or folders from an application you just installed.
As always, none of these back-up services are doing data corruption detection/correction - these services are only for catastrophic device failure. If you're paranoid about bit-rot of your files, you'll need to have yet another piece of software that, at a minimum, runs bit-flip detection (checksum) so you can be warned early enough to restore a corrupted file from back-up before the corrupted file becomes the only backed up copy.
Yeah, I had heard about CrashPlan withdrawing, but that was the number one on basically every list, so I'm grateful to hear about the others.
If I understand you correctly, are you saying that they don't do local backups as well as cloud backups? That's a bummer, I think that was one of the big positives for CrashPlan.
It seems like with their exit, my situation now is to assemble three different software suites: data sync (Google Drive), LAN backup (Windows Backup & Restore), and cloud backup (Backblaze). Does that sound about right?
What about cases in which a hard drive fails, will a service like Backblaze or Carbonite start sending nonsense or even deleting old data? Will it notify me? Can I roll it back and restore it like a source control system?
Best Buy pushed Kaspersky so damn hard that they nearly turned into Clippy from Word.
Eh, that depends on the store. My home store pushes Webroot hard because it's so much more lightweight than the other options. Kaspersky was always the one we had to fight with to fix, though it was usually issues with Safe Money.
I should clarify that for a long while, I was getting emails, "Hey! It looks like you haven't activated Kaspersky!" for about 2-3 months after we got a free copy when we bought my wife's iPad.
If I managed to get a free copy of webroot, I'd probably activate it since it's gotten reasonable reviews.
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TetraNitroCubaneThe DjinneratorAt the bottom of a bottleRegistered Userregular
edited September 2017
This isn't relevant to the larger Equifax discussion, but even so I had to share it somewhere, because...
Earlier today, this author was contacted by Alex Holden, founder of Milwaukee, Wisc.-based Hold Security LLC. Holden’s team of nearly 30 employees includes two native Argentinians who spent some time examining Equifax’s South American operations online after the company disclosed the breach involving its business units in North America.
It took almost no time for them to discover that an online portal designed to let Equifax employees in Argentina manage credit report disputes from consumers in that country was wide open, protected by perhaps the most easy-to-guess password combination ever: “admin/admin.”
...
But wait, it gets worse. From the main page of the Equifax.com.ar employee portal was a listing of some 715 pages worth of complaints and disputes filed by Argentinians who had at one point over the past decade contacted Equifax via fax, phone or email to dispute issues with their credit reports. The site also lists each person’s DNI — the Argentinian equivalent of the Social Security number — again, in plain text. All told, this section of the employee portal included more than 14,000 such records.
In the past, the largest unit of measurement for a security fuckup used to be the "Sony".
An "Equifax" is easily two or three orders of magnitude larger than a "Sony".
Earlier today, this author was contacted by Alex Holden, founder of Milwaukee, Wisc.-based Hold Security LLC. Holden’s team of nearly 30 employees includes two native Argentinians who spent some time examining Equifax’s South American operations online after the company disclosed the breach involving its business units in North America.
It took almost no time for them to discover that an online portal designed to let Equifax employees in Argentina manage credit report disputes from consumers in that country was wide open, protected by perhaps the most easy-to-guess password combination ever: “admin/admin.”
...
But wait, it gets worse. From the main page of the Equifax.com.ar employee portal was a listing of some 715 pages worth of complaints and disputes filed by Argentinians who had at one point over the past decade contacted Equifax via fax, phone or email to dispute issues with their credit reports. The site also lists each person’s DNI — the Argentinian equivalent of the Social Security number — again, in plain text. All told, this section of the employee portal included more than 14,000 such records.
In the past, the largest unit of measurement for a security fuckup used to be the "Sony".
An "Equifax" is easily two or three orders of magnitude larger than a "Sony".
One would hope so. For all its cyber security problems, Sony wasn't investigating my credit information for a home loan.
One "Sony" is still pretty god-awful, but I think Sony just isn't mechanically capable of an "Equifax"--just more "Sonys" if they're not careful (which I hope they are).
Posts
In short, sometime ago, someone figured out the light on-disk presence is optimal, and outsourcing the signatures to the 'cloud', gained increase efficiency that makes downloading a .dat file somewhat silly. Maybe Immunet was first - not sure there, but I can tell you this: Even if other companies copied that model, do you know who wins? He who has the biggest version of it - the goal here is to 'see' as much as you can see with malware on the Internet. The more you 'see', the better the efficacy of your coverage. So that way, if a guy seems some shady stuff in Bucharest, and it stops it in real time (as it should), then you in Seattle, should be nice and safe based on the engine inspection and it going to the cloud as 'malicious', and the only thing that traverses the cloud is the SHA256, which your end point client should have damn near instantly.
I can't reveal how I know it - I have to mindful of what I share on the Internet, but I can tell you this: Immunet's back-end is utterly vast. Something like 1.6 million unique malware samples a day, and every time someone installs it or a paid version of it (called AMP, which is for businesses), that net grows a little more. Economies of scale work to it's favor is what i'm saying.
So the 'catch', I guess, is that by installing it, if you flag something bad or nasty, that bad or nasty thing gets anonymously shared with a cloud of other bad things (the SHA really). Honestly, I struggle to find a downside. And it's meant to run along side traditional AV, so, you know, shore up your defenses.
Edit: Wait, I don't think I answered you question. The reason I run both is because detection isn't universal. Most SHA conviction schemes are automated - that's an industry standard, there's way too much bad stuff for most human eyes to parse out. So, giving a glitch in matrix, I double up. I've had stuff pass Webroot and Immunet catch. So far, Immunet's been the better bet, but you can't be too sure these days.
WoWtcg and general gaming podcast
WoWtcg and gaming website
Personally, no, but it's not unheard of at least as of 2015-16. I don't know if they're working to cross purposes per say, so I don't want to speculate. Most AV's won't flag other AV's as malicious and/or misbehave on purpose, but it could very well be one of those "Do at your own risk" kind of things. I do know that Immunet is specifically designed to run along and compliment traditional AV, but I can't tell if that's the norm vs. it's competitors, as there are way more products for malware than I've personally touched.
Given my industry and role, I should be more active in this thread, heh. If you got other questions, now's the time. Hit me with anything, and if I can answer, I will.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/03/technology/culture/malwaretech-arrested-las-vegas-trojan/index.html
The guy who originally found the killswitch that stopped the first wave of WannaCry has been arrested in Las Vegas for having played a role in developing and releasing a ransomware trojan of his own back in 2014/2015.
If it isn't sufficient for your needs, you probably need to be building a pfSense router/firewall to sit on your network or some similar dedicated solution.
My PC has locked up 3 times the last few days (except the mouse) and Immunet was recently installed. Wondering if they don't play nice eventually. It was fine the first day, I think, so this may be unrelated but I kind of hope it's that and not <something else>....
Avira, no, I run webroot. Have you checked Windows event viewer? What's the critical error/stop code? I don't do support for Immunet or anything, but they do have forums you can search against for problems. http://support.immunet.com/
or at least i hope it was a legitimate change
WoWtcg and general gaming podcast
WoWtcg and gaming website
Event viewer just shows kernel-power from my having to hard shutdown the PC to get it to reboot.
First 2 times it happened it was when a game was running and my FPS got worse and worse than everything locks up (except the mouse cursor). Third time was after rebooting from the 2nd. Today after removing Immunet it hasn't done it again so far, but may be a coincidence as it wasn't constant or anything.
Will take a look at those forums, though, thanks.
Equifax has been breached.
I don't even know how one is supposed to respond to this. Equifax has set up a website to "check" if you are impacted by this, but it looks sketchy as hell (particularly via whois) and only returns a "We'll get back to you/Check Back Later" response to anyone who uses it.
A credit freeze is unlikely to be helpful to the 44% of the US population who just lost their social security number.
Edit: They are offering one whole year of credit monitoring to anyone affected. Bonus: Accepting the offer waives your right to legal action concerning the hack.
PSN : Bolthorn
I'm actually debating putting a fraud alert on my profile at all 3 bureaus because of this. My credit was already frozen but I'm not naive enough to think I wasn't still affected.
The SSN implication means that fraudulent tax returns are going to spike for this tax year.
Different, but absolutely legit according to equifax.
The fact that they're requesting/collecting such sensitive personal information (more SSN digits than necessary) on a Wordpress site doesn't engender confidence.
Even if it's completely legit, using that site is still a terrible idea. Particularly after they've already proven their lack of trustworthiness.
For the interested:
I'm assuming the best arrangement would be to have a local backup from our laptops and other devices to the HTPC, then use something like Backblaze to take the off-site backup of those folders.
Edit: mega bonus points for clients that can handle cloud backup, sync, and local backup all in one.
Thoughts? Recommendations?
I touch on some of the companies in the spoiler.
Similarities:
Differences (these are ones that I think are important, your needs might not align with mine):
To provide cloud access through their websites, the private key (used to encrypt locally before transmitting) is stored on their server, as well as on the node. This means that the private key was transmitted at some point during setup. This is a point of failure for any of the services that want to let you access your data on their remote server as it creates a chance for a bad actor to siphon your key when it is transmitted.
The difference is in how they let you take control of the key management process:
Carbonite will give you the option to manage your keys locally. Meaning they're not transmitted to the Carbonite servers. The downside is that if you lose this key, there is literally nothing, short of a catastrophic breach of the encryption algorithm, that Carbonite can do to decrypt your data. This is helpful with minimizing the impact of well funded actors from getting your stuff.
Backblaze lets you enter a passphrase (password) that is then used to encrypt the key. This is less ideal because you still have to transmit something across the internet. In this case, you're transmitting two things so the odds go down, but it's likely not going to be as secure as just not transmitting the key at all.
BackBlaze will back-up everything with a few pre-defined exclusions. This is great if you don't want to always manage the folders that get backed up. However it means you'll have to manage the folders you don't want backed up (e.g., the telemetry data that windows 10 generates in AppData/Local, AppData/Roaming, Program Data/, or other caches; think firefox browsing caches, even when in private-mode).
Carbonite seems to take the opposite approach and only backup folders that were selected for backup. This is great if you won't want unintentional usage data about you existing on yet another server, but it's very sad if you forgot to white list a folder or folders from an application you just installed.
As always, none of these back-up services are doing data corruption detection/correction - these services are only for catastrophic device failure. If you're paranoid about bit-rot of your files, you'll need to have yet another piece of software that, at a minimum, runs bit-flip detection (checksum) so you can be warned early enough to restore a corrupted file from back-up before the corrupted file becomes the only backed up copy.
Eh, that depends on the store. My home store pushes Webroot hard because it's so much more lightweight than the other options. Kaspersky was always the one we had to fight with to fix, though it was usually issues with Safe Money.
Yeah, I had heard about CrashPlan withdrawing, but that was the number one on basically every list, so I'm grateful to hear about the others.
If I understand you correctly, are you saying that they don't do local backups as well as cloud backups? That's a bummer, I think that was one of the big positives for CrashPlan.
It seems like with their exit, my situation now is to assemble three different software suites: data sync (Google Drive), LAN backup (Windows Backup & Restore), and cloud backup (Backblaze). Does that sound about right?
What about cases in which a hard drive fails, will a service like Backblaze or Carbonite start sending nonsense or even deleting old data? Will it notify me? Can I roll it back and restore it like a source control system?
I should clarify that for a long while, I was getting emails, "Hey! It looks like you haven't activated Kaspersky!" for about 2-3 months after we got a free copy when we bought my wife's iPad.
If I managed to get a free copy of webroot, I'd probably activate it since it's gotten reasonable reviews.
Holy cripes on toast, how are they so BAD at this?!
In the past, the largest unit of measurement for a security fuckup used to be the "Sony".
An "Equifax" is easily two or three orders of magnitude larger than a "Sony".
One would hope so. For all its cyber security problems, Sony wasn't investigating my credit information for a home loan.
One "Sony" is still pretty god-awful, but I think Sony just isn't mechanically capable of an "Equifax"--just more "Sonys" if they're not careful (which I hope they are).