It´s not the snow that´s falling
Nov 5th, 2021 by Jesper Kråkhede
Every Swede of a certain age knows Anders F. Rönnblom´s ‘Det är inte snön som faller’ from 1980, the punk anti-Christmas song with the cartoon video that was shown on TV on Christmas Eve for years. I can´t get it out of my head this time of year, so here is my own security version. Not his lyrics, just borrowing the idea.
It´s not the snow that´s falling
it´s servers going down
the backups were reachable
and the admins logged on all over town.
It´s not the snow that´s falling
it´s the password from last year
the SOC sent off a mail on Friday
and on Monday it´s all too clear.
Joking aside, Christmas is coming and with it the holidays. For the attackers it is high season. Fewer people at work, slower decisions, systems that nobody wants to touch until January. Every year I spend some part of the holidays on an incident that started on the 23rd or the 24th.
So before you light the candles: Patch what is exposed to internet. Check that the backups ran and that one copy is out of reach. Make sure someone is watching the alerts, and that they can act.
Then enjoy the snow. The real one.