Every year, the research firms’ analysts send questionnaires and conduct interviews. The new trend I have noticed in the analysts’ questions is a proactive approach towards ransomware protection.
It seems that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a part of the US Department of Commerce, wrote in a publication on Ransomware Risk Management that ransomware protection consists of Identifying, Protecting, Detecting, Responding, and Recovering.
To my understanding, the NIST publication addresses an organization as a whole. But now I get the question: How can LINBIT’s products help protect against ransomware functions? Continuous snapshotting (e.g. every 15 minutes, keeping 64 of them), a feature of LINBIT SDS (and LINSTOR), is a valuable building block for the Recovery function, which enables rapid restoration from the snapshots. I do not see us in the Identify, Protect, Detect, or Respond functions. Theoretically, we could provide block device-level software that recognizes well-known file systems and detects a sweeping operation that replaces regular files with encrypted files.
However, have you seen a virus scanner on block device level? I do not know one. Thus, these other functions should be implemented on an alternate level in the stack. A ransomware-access-pattern-scanner should be implemented where you have an existing virus scanner. The Linux Fanotify(7) API comes to mind, which needs to be on a layer with access to the file system.
Moving into LINBIT content, ‘Highly Available NFS for Proxmox With LINSTOR Gateway’ is a blog post that demonstrates how the benefits of adding highly available NFS shares to a Proxmox Virtual Environment are more than worth the effort.
LINBIT Solutions Architect Matt Kereczman recently wrote about ‘Highly Available NFS Storage using LINBIT HA for Kubernetes’ on our blog. As Matt writes, “LINBIT develops a purpose-built LINBIT SDS operator and CSI driver for Kubernetes, but sometimes an application or DevOps team requires ‘good old’ NFS-backed storage. However, NFS on its own does not offer high availability clustering, and for that, LINBIT’s software and support has you covered.”
Additionally, we’ve updated one of our more popular blog posts with new information, as we occasionally do when given the opportunity. You can read ‘The Benefits of High Availability (HA)‘ here.
As many of you may know, we recently held our quarterly Community Meeting in June. We have divided the meeting into individual parts, which you can watch on our YouTube channel. First, Christoph Böhmwalder provides a technical overview of LINBIT VSAN. Gabor then shares some insight into some exciting new LINSTOR features currently in development.
The final half of our meeting begins with Yusuf Yıldız providing an overview of the challenges our clients can face when replicating data between data centers. Our meeting concludes with Robert Altnoeder introducing the benefits of DRBDmon, which will undoubtedly be a beneficial tool for our users.
Regarding recent software updates, WinDRBD 1.1.16 fixes a reason for a BSOD (system crash) when there are 4 billion I/O requests submitted to WinDRBD. Updating WinDRBD to 1.1.16 is recommended.
