Posts by Hannes Kasparick

In this second part (the first part can be found here) of setting up and hardening a Veeam “hardened repository,” I will cover how to set up Ubuntu 20.04 in a secure way. While it’s “just a minimal installation,” I have seen many questions on this topic, so let’s clear some things up. Read more

Veeam sees strong demand for immutable backups, and the Veeam Backup & Replication Hardened Repository is well positioned to provide that. Sometimes people believe that remote time attacks against Veeam Hardened Repository via network time protocol (NTP) are easy. That’s wrong! Read more

The Veeam Hardened Repository is Veeam’s native solution to provide trusted immutability for backups of Veeam Backup & Replication on a Linux server. By supporting generic Linux servers, Veeam ensures that customers always have a choice about their hardware without vendor lock-in. Veeam also allows customers to use their trusted Linux distribution (Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE) instead of being forced to use a “custom Veeam Linux”. Read more

Anyone with console access to a Linux machine can get root access on the machine by booting into “single user mode”. In this blog, I will show how to boot into single user mode and how to protect the bootloader against unauthenticated attempts to boot into single user mode. Read more

With Veeam Backup & Replication version 10, it’s possible to back up NAS shares with the SMB (CIFS) and NFS protocol. One of the challenges with backing up large file shares is doing so in a consistent state. This blog post shows how to create a consistent backup of an SMB share hosted on a NetApp FAS storage by using Microsoft VSS snapshots. Read more

Imagine a situation (a disaster), where the virtual infrastructure needs to be restored from scratch. Everything is lost, except the backup files are available on a (Hardened) Repository in the disaster site or in the Capacity Tier of a Scale-out Backup Repository. Imagine that not even a configuration backup is available. This blog describes how to do recover your data in five steps. Read more

Third-party software that interacts with VMware vCenter must store credentials somewhere. These credentials are the target of attackers as they often provide high privileges on one of the central components of a busines IT infrastructure. This blog post shows how a “least privilege model” implementation with Veeam Backup & Replication can work. Read more