On my FS I have a ‘Share Name’ for me to put in my private stuff. How do I put a password on it? And I’ve got a folder on the FS for my daughter which she put songs & movies into. It’s always been fine. Now her computer is riddled with viruses, it’s a school computer and they don’t use virus protection. Should I be worried about her putting that stuff into the FS?
thanks
You should probably be worried if her computer has write access to other folders on the Drobo FS. If it has, then any virus/worm/malware could read it for sensitive info (credit cards, bank accounts, ssn…), modify files to infect and propagate itself, and finally erase anything.
Also, if you have SSH enabled on the Drobo FS, you really really ought to change the root password. The default password is ridiculously easy to guess, and root access to a nice system like the FS is all malware wants.
Unless you have SSH enabled via the DroboApp, the root password issue is somewhat blunted, as there won’t be a shell to connect to or any other use for it. If you do have it set up, then you really MUST heed the warnings in the readme to set the root password.
As long as you have separate shares, a compromised computer will only be able to access those it’s authorized to - guest shares and ones it has saved credentials for. Any other share would be unaffected.
As long as you create a password-protecetd share and don’t access it from the compromised computer, you should be fine.
Also remember the root issue here is infected files. As long as your other shares are protected is one thing. But if you have a system that has access to both shares and her share has some infected files, there is a possibility for the infection to spread.
Be sure that you have a good virus detection program on any computer that has access to her share!
Antivirus (not necessarily running on the server) is critical for any environment, but especially in a shared environment, whether that sharing is of files or access.
Infected files don’t do anything until code is executed. So really, there’s no issue with “infected files” on a NAS. Besides, viruses are all but non-existant anymore. Everything today is trojans, and those are almost exclusively going to live in your system and application directories, i.e. on your main hard drive. About the only exception are things that try to tie into autorun, such as on USB keys. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s no such thing as autorun for a network share.
Data is data. Don’t conflate it with executing code.
True, malicious code must be opened/run to do damage. However the practical issue is simply that shared data means someone else has access to your data in addition to you.
A scenario that recently played out at work, an infected file got onto a machine somehow. The user of that machine put the file in a shared location and told the other users to open it, and they did, increasing the infected machine count. Meanwhile, the malicious code was trying to spread itself to other machines on the network, but luckily the network filtering kept it from spreading too far.
Shared files are carriers, regardless of whether they’re shared on the Internet or on a local network.
Besides, there are effective free antivirus (should probably be called antimalware, but everything gets lumped into “virus” these days as you alluded) tools available there like Microsoft Security Essentials for Windows users.
Not to say that every machine needs to be weighed down by antivirus, but there needs to be someone to verify that the food in the shared fridge hasn’t gone bad, and to notify others if/when it has.