Systems administrators are among the first to point out lax security policies in other companies' or people's setups. Sometimes, they are the ones who get bitten by not taking the same advice they will so readily dispense. Such is the tale of Reddit user NakamuraHwang, who had files on their Synology DS918+ NAS encrypted by a ransomware attack after making a series of unforced errors.

Hwang appears to be quite technically proficient and provided a detailed write-up of the situation. The key points, however, are that the unit in question (a) had its web interface exposed to the internet and (b) was roughly 18 months out-of-date with security patches. Just like the recent PHP snafu has adeptly shown, complacency is a far worse enemy than an army of AI bots.

The tech has a 3-2-1 backup setup, so they seemingly didn't lose any data. They attached the disks to a Proxmox machine for further inspection — Synology's DSM operating system uses mdraid underneath, so you can take the disks to another box and mount them there. Investigation of logs and the operating system files revealed that the attack was likely performed by abusing the CVE-2024-10441 remote code execution vulnerability, revealed a year and a half ago.

As most any other sysadmin will tell you, it's never advisable to expose devices directly to the internet without some layer of protection in between, chiefly but not only a VPN or an SSH tunnel. Tailscale, for instance, makes having a VPN fairly painless these days, and its free plan covers most home installations.

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