<story><title>Irish health service hit by cyber attack</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-57111615</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jl6</author><text>I have a feeling there is a very short security-hygiene checklist that, if followed, could prevent the vast majority of the ransomware attacked that we have seen in the last few years.&lt;p&gt;* Keep all systems up to date with the latest patches.&lt;p&gt;* Have a DR plan and test it regularly.&lt;p&gt;* Make frequent backups, verify them, and keep them &lt;i&gt;offline&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Historically organizations have been so bad at backups that the advice has been to automate them as much as possible, to try to ensure that a recent backup at least exists. But I am increasingly of the opinion that the next level of backup maturity is to dial back on the automation and invest &lt;i&gt;manual&lt;/i&gt; effort in airgapping the backups.&lt;p&gt;Fully automated backups are necessarily part of the software attack surface.&lt;p&gt;If you have to hire more ops people to rotate tapes by hand every day, that will have to be a cost of doing business safely.</text></comment>
<story><title>Irish health service hit by cyber attack</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-57111615</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>new_here</author><text>A lot of these articles don&amp;#x27;t actually mention specifically how the systems were compromised.&lt;p&gt;Was it a malicious email attachment that propagated through unsecured networks or outdated OS versions? And what data was encrypted? Are we talking regular excel files or actual databases?&lt;p&gt;It would be interesting to have some more detail or case studies so others could know how to fortify infection points and limit the blast radius of their own systems.</text></comment>