Ransomware

Anne & Lynn Wheeler lynn at garlic.com
Mon Jun 9 18:07:12 EDT 2008


John Ioannidis wrote:
> This is no different than suffering a disk crash.  That's what backups 
> are for.
>
>
At Jim Gray's tribute on the 31st, Bruce Lindsay gave a talk about Jim's
formalization of transaction processing enabled online transactions ... i.e.
needed trust in the integrity of integrity of transaction as prerequisite
to move from manual/paper processes.

In the early 90s, when glasshouse and mainframes seeing significant
downturn in their use ... with lots of stuff moving off to PCs, there
was a study that half of the companies that had a disk failure involving
(business) data that wasn't backed up ... filed for bankruptcy within
30 days. The issue was that glasshouse tended to have all sorts
of business processes to backup business critical data. Disk failures
that lost stuff like billing data had significant impact
on cash flow (there was case of large telco that had
bug in its nightly backup and when the disk crashed with customer
billing data ... they found that there didn't have valid backups).

Something similar also showed up in the Key Escrow meetings in the
mid-90s with regard to business data that was normally kept in encrypted
form ... i.e. would require replicated key backup/storage in order to
retrieve data (countermeasure to single point of failure). part of the
downfall of key escrow was that it seem to want all keys ... not just
infrastructure where business needed to have replicated its own
keys.

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