Backups [was Re: Is tape dead?]

On 09/18/2015 09:49 AM, Fred Cisin wrote: I think it's more complicated than that. Here's a sample of what happened to me in the last few days. I received an email for a lost password reset in Twitter. This was odd, as I've never ever been tempted to sign up for that pile of steaming gossip and sociopathy called Twitter. But there it was, my email and a link coming (verified by headers) from twitter.com. Internally, it used a name, but it wasn't mine. I sent a complaint to Twitter along with the complete forwarded message demanding to know what was going on. I got the automated response, but then utter silence. I'd be surprised if I got much more than that. I've often stated that the problem with the malware protection business is that it's reactive, not pro-active. So there's got to be hours or days for the nastyware to propagate before someone writes a detector for it. There's been apparently a virus active for months that spies on online poker players: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34289003 Where were Norton, AVG, etc. for those months? I don't blame them; they're trying to make up for the fact that most operating systems are failing at their basic task of protecting the user. FWIW, the small server I use here runs OpenBSD. The level of paranoia of the code base maintainers impresses me--but I don't trust it entirely. One can but wonder how many backups are infected with the same virus. --Chuck