Treasure Hunting

The latest iPhone scandal about the phone keeping tabs on you, storing it in an onboard database and then letting that info get backed-up regularly with your iTunes backup had me thinking about some of the other content I've seen in my many years of running backups in various places. Once, I had the biggest MP3 collection of any user at my company...

We had several tens of thousands of employees and my collection was due to the simple fact that many, many users kept all their MP3 files on their system and our poor, over-worked backup application had to back them up every single time. Being the 'white hat' kinda guy I am, I would never use data restores for nefarious purposes but those MP3s were just too tempting - I'd simply run a search of the FULL backup images from the weekend, look for a new treasure trove of music and then kick off a couple of "test" restores. Voila! Instant MP3 collection.

Sure, we could've excluded those file types from the backups but company policy was to trawl the entire drive and grab whatever was there, pump it to tape and hold it for 4 weeks. It wasn't as if there were millions of MP3s out there but certainly a sizable amount. I'm not going to complain about the bandwidth and backup processing power that was wasted on these files and their ilk, that obvious rant is for another time.

Of course people save photos on their systems also, either just to look at during a lull in the day or as a prelude to uploading to (or even downloading from...) some social media site or other. These days most of these photos will likely have location information stored in their file headers if they were taken with a cellphone. I'll wager you could quickly write up a little program that would read all of these juicy location details (after a sneaky data restore job submission) and give you a nice map of where the pictures were actually taken and when.

Thinking bigger picture and from a legal standpoint, this info could then be used to show that Jimmy in Accounting wasn't at home with an upset tummy but was actually partying-it-up somewhere exotic.

I'm not condoning any of this or telling you to temper your Backup Admins with their access to systems but care should be taken with what is being backed-up and who has access - just as what people are creating and/or storing on their systems is an iffy area also. There's just a multitude of information on your systems and our backups see it all... if you remember that, you'll establish process to take precautions, unless of course, you need a copy of Rihanna's latest hit.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/6273016

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