There was a magazine article maybe in the 90's that appeared to be a
news report about a company that went through something like you
described - systems down, won't IPL, backup disks corrupted, backup
tapes deleted or corrupted, even documentation gone I think. Then about
the 3rd paragraph the writer said it was a fake story just to get you
moving.
Interesting how they kept things quiet in your first case. I think
that's common but adds to the appearance that "mainframes don't get
hacked", which is unrealistic. Uh oh, paging Bill...
On 3/10/2023 11:49 PM, Leonard D Woren wrote:
It's actually much more complex than that. Here's a little-known story
from a place I used to used to work some decades back. This did not
happen on an MVS system, but some other vendor's system with those
letters in a different order. One day that system crashed, I think for
no apparent reason. Rebooting it failed. Apparently the system disk
volume was corrupted. They restored from a backup. That backup was
corrupted. They tried backup after backup, going all the way back to
the oldest backup they had, 5 months old. It was corrupted. They had to
rebuild the system from scratch. Apparently a hacker with a lot of
patience had gotten them. They were very tight-lipped about what
happened, even to data center staff, but the above leaked out to me.
The takeaway should be just because your backups appear to be
successful, unless you regularly test restoring from backups, you really
don't know that they're any good. So even on MVS or z/OS or whatever it
might happen to be called tomorrow, TEST THOSE BACKUPS. Even if they're
"read-only".
One of my current employer's customers needed to restore a catalog from
backup due to the catalog being broken. Well, it was broken for much
longer than they realized, and all of the backups (4 months worth) were
incomplete due to that. Nobody was looking at the backup job to ensure
that it was successful.
At another place I worked in the dim past, the HSM SDSPs were backed up
daily via REPRO to tape. Do I really need to say it? The backups were
all truncated due to a key sequence error in the SDSPs, but nobody was
looking at the REPRO output.
/Leonard
Colin Paice wrote on 3/10/2023 12:27 AM:
Does it protect you from ransomware? It gets you back to a good backup.
It depends on how often you backup - and having ransomware means you
might
lose all changes since the last backup so unless the database is read
only
- you are likely to lose some data.
On Thu, 9 Mar 2023 at 23:44, Attila Fogarasi <fogar...@gmail.com> wrote:
Also there are various solutions for immutable backups of z/OS data,
which
would protect you against ransomware.
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