27 July 2019

On May 7th, 2019 the city of Baltimore was hit by a ransomware attack.  Although the city hired Microsoft and five other firms it has not fully recovered from the attack yet.(1)

Since the city’s email system was down officials started to use Gmail accounts for communications.(1)(2) This makes sense in the case of an emergency. Not communicating in the case of a publicly visible cyber-attack commonly has a large financial impact on businesses; but in the case of cities this may result in the loss of public security.

The ransomware attack on Norsk Hydro on March 19th, 2019 impressively shows the effect of good communications(3)(4): Investor’s confidence was not endangered at any time, the share price remained unchanged.

But from a strategic point of view, just moving to the whatever cloud is not a good idea. Google’s idea behind ChromeOS was simply clever: If everything (applications and data) is stored in the cloud the impact of e.g. ransomware will be negligible because the malware cannot jump across the https barrier to your cloud storage. The same holds for O365.

Unfortunately, users are not used of this way of working in the browser. It’s often slow, requires a change in working habits, travelling requires extra preparation, etc. So, Microsoft invented OneDrive and Google came up with Sync for Windows. Similar tools are available for Box and DropBox, and for all desktop operating systems, even for Linux.

Linux setup online accounts during first login

With these syncing tools, the data stored in the cloud is made available on the user’s desktop. Changes to local files are synchronized immediately to the cloud and vice versa. And with this, the ransomware problem still exists because if a ransomware encrypts the synchronized files on the local copy the change is immediately synchronized to the cloud.
Game over.

So, if you want to take advantage of the cloud you have to run a vast change project: The whole working environment with all forms, templates, etc. must be provided in the cloud. And the employees must get used of the new way of working.

We need change!

But the effort pays off: Your network becomes more resilient against cyber-attacks, workstations can be easily exchanged, the endpoint complexity can be reduced, windows domains and in the end, the campus network, will become dispensable.

So, think before you sync!

Have a great weekend.

1. Duncan I. Google Pitches to Baltimore after Ransomware Attacks [Internet]. Government Technology. 2019 [zitiert 27. Juli 2019]. Verfügbar unter: https://www.govtech.com/computing/Google-Pitches-to-Baltimore-after-Ransomware-Attacks.html
2. Cyber-spies tight-lipped on Baltimore hack. BBC News [Internet]. 27. Mai 2019 [zitiert 27. Juli 2019]; Verfügbar unter: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48423954
3. Norsk Hydro. Update: Hydro subject to cyber attack [Internet]. 2019 [zitiert 24. Mai 2019]. Verfügbar unter: https://www.hydro.com/de-DE/medien/news/2019/update-hydro-subject-to-cyber-attack/
4. Norsk Hydro ASA. Norsk Hydro: Update: Hydro subject to cyber-attack – 19.03.19 – News – ARIVA.DE [Internet]. de. 2019 [zitiert 24. Mai 2019]. Verfügbar unter: https://www.ariva.de/news/norsk-hydro-update-hydro-subject-to-cyber-attack-7476743