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| | Wow. Just Wow Wow. Just Wow. Yes, I meant to use a capital letter there. The Red Cross' Blood Service in Australia had database backups on a website that anyone could access. That means that anyone could download the backup, which contained PII (Personally Identifiable Information) about donors. This was a mysql dump file, which is shockingly easy to restore, so anyone could have read the file inside of an hour. To be fair here, this wasn't the Red Cross' fault. A partner had put the file on a website, perhaps for developers or an analyst to download, but the web server had directory browsing available and was serving data on a public IP. That's three major faults, and perhaps a fourth since the backup file wasn't protected at all. How many of us have innocently taken a backup, put it in a location for someone else to download inside our company, and not thought anything of the action? If you have done this, would you know if the file were accessed and downloaded by the wrong person? In most cases we wouldn't because the correct person might download the file as well and we wouldn't think anything had ever gone wrong. That's a problem with data. We don't get necessarily notified if someone makes a copy. We certainly have no way of knowing if the backup files we create are ever restored by an unauthorized user, much less just copied. We often just assume that data at rest is just at rest and isn't ever mishandled without our knowing about it. This is a good reason why we should be practicing security by default in most every case. All our backups should be protected at the very least with passwords. Even if everyone in the organization knows the password, some random person that might steal a laptop or browse an unsecured web server won't know it. The password also shouldn't be easily guessed, and if possible, the data should be encrypted. Always. What's more, I would hope that we would use secure ways of moving information around with our fellow employees and partners. I know Dropbox is a very convenient and tempting mechanism to use, but is it really appropriate? It might be good enough if you've protected the data in other ways, but I'd be very, very wary of using any public service that doesn't allow for some sort of security that can be tied to individual, authenticated users. No matter how you choose to protect and transfer database backups, I'd also be sure that you don't leave the information there indefinitely. Have expiration times where files are removed. All encryption and protection can be cracked, given enough time and resources, so don't leave your files there forever. Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.comJoin the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums |
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| |  | | How to fix SQL Server disk I/O bottlenecks (without a hammer) In this new article, Simple-Talk editor Tony Davis explains step-by-step how to find and fix the root causes of disk I/O bottlenecks, including gathering data, avoiding knee-jerk fixes, and how monitoring tools can help. Read now. |
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 | Additional Articles from SQLPerformance.com Rob Farley discusses some solutions and gotchas for implementing a custom sort using ORDER BY in T-SQL queries. More » |
 | Kenneth Fisher from SQLServerCentral Blogs SQL Server stores a create date and a change date for each object in the sys.objects system view. Unfortunately while... More » |
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| | | Today's Question (by Steve Jones): If I am in a PowerShell command shell and want to change to get a list of the instance registrations I have for my local SSMS Local Server Group, what command do I use? |
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| Yesterday's Question of the Day |
| Yesterday's Question (by Lesole Sebego): CREATE TABLE #NUMBERS(A SMALLINT, B INT) GO INSERT INTO #NUMBERS SELECT 30000, 2000000000 GO 2 -- 1 SELECT SUM(A) AS A FROM #NUMBERS -- 2 SELECT SUM(B) AS A FROM #NUMBERS What will be the answers for the 2 queries above?
Answer: 1) 60000, 2) Fails Arithmetic overflow error Explanation: In the first query, the smallint is implicitly converted to an int by SUM. However, the expressions in the second query are int, but this will not be returned as a bigint, which is needed to store the value. Hence the error. This query would work: SELECT SUM(CONVERT(BIGINT,B)) AS A FROM #NUMBERS Ref: SUM - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187810.aspx
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