Even as a home user, you know you should back up your data. Perhaps you're scrupulous about getting stuff on your hard disk copied onto other media. Perhaps you even make sure you have off-site copies. If your workplace falls into the SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) or further along the continuum between micro enterprises and big business, it's far more likely that you make the effort.

That's all well and good for the data that fuel your business and are primarily kept locally. What about the increasing amount of data that is held Somewhere Out There? It's getting harder to find any business that doesn't have some sort of web presence, and most Mom and Pop Shops don't run their own web servers. SC Magazine have just posted an article I put together a few days ago on the impact of the recent attack on Distribute.IT, an Australian domain registrar and web hosting provider: "Cloudy with spells of pain".

In fact, the article covers rather more than the Distribute.IT issue, but what I had principly in mind at that point was the impact of some 4,800 of its customers whose businesses may have been threatened when data, sites and email on four of its servers were lost. That's certainly food for thought for anyone who assumes that their web provider is going to have professional backup strategies in place to ensure that customers don't suffer catastrophic data loss.

Natalie Apostolou has now reported for the Register that Distribute.IT and its offshoot have been acquired by the NetRegistry Group. Apostolou suggests that this reflects Distribute.IT's eagerness to maintain continuity of service. This may well be the case, but it's unlikely to work out optimally for Distribute.IT's employees: NetRegistry may be recruiting, but it's unlikely that it will absorb all the staff currently employed by its new acquisitions.

David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP
ESET Senior Research Fellow