If It's Smart, It's Vulnerable

One of the problems with a rescue operation of this magnitude is that the existing systems are untrustworthy. Nobody wants to reactivate malware and allow it to destroy data that has already been restored. So, Maersk wiped all the data on all of their laptops. Next, they proceeded to update the operating system on all workstations.

Linux would never have become a global success story if subjected to license terms or limitations or if its innovations had been patent-protected.

Information security is like Tetris. Your successes disappear, but your failures do not.

Establishing connections became a problem. All Maersk's computers and servers had crashed, so email and the company's internal chat system were down. To his surprise, Andy also found that the contacts on employees' phones had been wiped clean, because they were configured to fetch contacts from online servers, which had now been deleted. The Maiden

Working in information security is sometimes a bit like playing Tetris: your successes disappear but your failures accumulate. When information security works flawlessly, it is invisible. And rarely is anyone thanked for stopping a disaster that didn't happen.

In the early days, their embossed credit card numbers were transferred using carbon paper and an imprinter upon payment. Later, a magnetic stripe, then an EMV chip and, finally, an RFID circuit made contactless payments possible. Many modern credit cards have all of these, making new credit cards compatible with the same “knuckle buster” imprinters

There were no backups of Maersk's DC servers, because all 151 servers were perfect copies of each other. They continuously and automatically synchronized user data between each other. Effectively, this meant that they had 151 backups of the DC servers, as you could never lose all 151 servers at the same time…except for when Notpetya struck.

Notpetya was built just to wreak havoc. While it looked like a ransomware trojan, this was a cover story: in reality, Notpetya was a cyberweapon. Any machines infected by it displayed a ransom note similar to real ransomware Trojans, but paying the ransom did not restore the data.

Practically all color printers leave a unique fingerprint on their output: they print nearly invisible, light yellow dots on every page. These dots give the time of the printing and the printer's unique identifier. In other words, if you print out controversial opinions, you could, in principle, be traced.