Serious Cyber-Attacks in Progress.

 Over the past few weeks there have been a number of high profile computer system outages.

In the USA the NOTAMS system was down that halted commercial flights for a while.

In the UK, the Royal Mail halted international post for over a week because they were hacked with a ransomware attack. 

There have been instances of other computer outages reported across the Western World. And a lot more that didn't make it to the news.

This is serious. The West is being attacked by foreign actors. Maybe not directly, but online through cyber attacks. I expect that attacks against the USA, Germany and the UK will ramp up now we've all announced we're sending battalions of tanks to Ukraine. The number 14 isn't a coincidence. 14 is a standard NATO tank battalion. The USA is sending around 30 tanks, which probably means 28 tanks and maybe a couple to cannibalise for spares. Because Ukraine doesn't have the same logistical support Western armies have.

I do wonder actually how many of those 14 Challenger 2 and 14 Leopard 2 tanks will actually roll out onto the plains of Ukraine and how many will still be rolling 3 months after deployment. Because they break down. A lot. And they take quite a bit of ongoing maintenance.

Anyway, that's not the subject of this piece.

Cyber attacks are at a high at the moment. The only reason you haven't been attacked is the hackers don't think you are relevant. Although even small companies are getting clickware emails. We know the originators come from Russia. Whether state-sponsored actors, or a group of nerds in a cellar in St. Petersburg pissed off at Western support for Ukraine.

I hope all the important infrastructure companies and the NHS (remember their big cyber attack a few years ago?) are on full alert and have decent backups and cyber security in place.

Right now I'd be ramping any weekly backups up to daily or two-daily secure offline/off site backups. Because even losing a week's worth of data can be crippling to a company.

And you will have to wipe all of that week's data as you will have to completely wipe all your PCs and start again. The more regularly you do backups, the more relevant the data and the less work is involved in recreating it once the systems have been restored.