Posts by Heavy Soil

Two billion years ago, snowball Earth was defrosted in huge asteroid crash – and it's been downhill ever since

That's not the crater

Apparently the crater is 70 kilometres across, so that photo is of something MUCH smaller - unless that road is a few km across, and those shrubs are likewise enormous...

The safest place to save your files is somewhere nobody will ever look

Email version too...

I had one user who had carefully stored every important email he'd received and sent over several years, in dozens of folders.

Did he do this on the correct place in his mailbox? No.

Had he done this in a locally-ony stored corruption-prone PST file, like a lot of users? No.

The whole structure was all stored within his Deleted Items folder.

This came to light only after a he got back from his honeymoon, to find just tumbleweeds where years of frequently-referenced work had previsouly been.

It turned out there had been an unpublicised policy change by the HQ corporate team, which meant that emails were regularly purged from that folder.

Of course things can still be recovered after being deleted in Exchange, but of course they'd shortened that timeout too, and it had all gone.

It took a *lot* of explaining this to that HQ IT team, followed by a huge amount of political faff for the UK business managers to persuade HQ that this stuff was worth enough for them to restore the mailbox with the whole folder intact, followed by far more work for them to achieve that.

FInally, the user was re-educated to use folders within his mailbox - and yes, I used the same "you wouldn't carefully organise your paperwork into the bin under your desk for permanent storage" line too...

UK defines Cyber DEFCON 1, 2 and 3, though of course doesn't call it that

But how do we know?

The question in your headline made me follow the bait and click to find out... but there's no answer there. If there's a top-severity attack later today, how do I as an IT manager find out about it?

I read the page on the NCSC site and there isn't an alert email list to sign up to, nothing of the sort... I understand the need for categorisation of this stuff so defences and responses can be planned, but communication with members of the public who have a vested interest should be a big part of it.