Warning: Are Cloud Backups Even Safe?

Key Takeaways

companies seem to be pushing us to back up our configurations, our files more and more to the cloud. It's secure in the cloud, right? Well, let's see about that. Sonic Wall breached. This is a firewall vendor. Firewall backup data exposed. So, in this example, confidential information, firewall backups are being stored in the cloud. And guess what? The cloud was breached. This is from Security Week. Sonic Wall prompts password resets after hackers obtain firewall configurations. And on dark reading, threat actors breached the my Sonic Wall service and accessed backup firewall configuration files, but Sonic Wall says that affects fewer than 5% of their install base. But just think about that. Firewall configuration information is being backed up and now hackers have got access to it. So on September 17th, Sonic Wall disclosed a cloud backup file incident. The security teams at the companies detected suspicious activity targeting the cloud backup service for firewalls and confirmed it to be a security event. In the past few days, attackers were able to access encrypted credentials as well as firewall configuration files that could make it easier for attackers to potentially exploit the related firewall. According to Sonic Wall, less than 5% of its customers were affected and the hackers did not leak the files online yet. But risks associated with the breach require immediate action. So this is not ransomware but a series of brute force attacks. Always find it funny when people tell me on YouTube brute force attacks don't work. Here's another real world example. So this is a series of brute force attacks aimed at gaining access to the preference files stored in backup for potential further use by the threat actors. So Sonic Wall has notified potentially affected customers and provided them with fresh preference files which should be imported into the firewalls. The new preference files contain randomized passwords for all local users, reset bindings where TOTP is enabled, and randomize IPSecVPN keys. These configuration changes have been made to update these possibly exposed parameters and provide a configuration you may find useful for remediation, Sonic Wall says. Now, the company does caution that importing these new files could cause certain IPSecVPN disruptions until the new keys are manually configured on peer termination points and the password reset process is complete. You will also have to reboot your firewall. So, here's the problem again. If you back up your configurations and confidential information to the cloud and the cloud gets breached, hackers get access to huge amounts of data like they did here, can cause all kinds of problems. Don't know about you, but I don't think backing stuff up to the cloud is necessarily a great idea in 2025. Offline backups in many cases seem to be a lot better, but perhaps I'm entirely wrong. What are your thoughts? Do you back up your photos? Do you back up your personal files to the cloud or do you store them offline locally? Do you use a NAS or something else to store backups?