A ransomware attack on Rackspace Hosted Exchange lasted several days in late 2022. Cover your assets with a data migration
If this ransomware attack or others that have made headlines has you concerned for your company’s data security, a data migration to a new server system might be the right move. Generally speaking, you can leverage Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace for your messaging (email) service. Consider Umzuzu to help serve your data needs if you are in this consideration process!
The migration process is the same regardless if you move from Rackspace to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
There are nuances in migrating to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, but it’s more or less the same process in this unique situation.
There are three primary sources of email:
- new inbound messages
- new outbound messages
- historical email (and folders as well as calendars and contacts in a Hosted Exchange environment)
New, inbound email
Your publically visible MX records dictate the delivery of new inbound email messages; your nameservers host these records at a company like GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Network Solutions, etc. It’s like the address on your apartment, condo, house, or business – UPS or whoever can reference this address and deliver you new mail. Email works the same way. Since Rackspace Hosted Exchange has been out for days with no timeline for restoration, people are changing their MX records immediately to get inbound emails flowing.
New, outbound email
Sometimes things in technology are easy!
The Server Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server is responsible for new, outbound emails. Generally, this is set up/ready to go immediately and automatically. You will want to update (or create) your SPF record to match your new email service. You should only have one SPF record; the single record would combine the information telling the rest of us who we should expect to receive email from on your behalf. This record would show Microsoft or Google. If you have an email marketing service like Mailchimp, SendGrid, HubSpot, or perhaps the IP address of a server sending out invoices – their SPF information would also be part of that DNS entry.
Historical email, calendar, and contact data
The fact that Rackspace Hosted Exchange is so incredibly broken takes some of the pressure off here. Data migration is the most complicated part of the process. Timing is usually very important – you must coordinate the change between the email services. In this case, we don’t.
The organizations we’re assisting with this process have been unable to reach their Exchange mailboxes. Without access to the server, your best bet is what we call a client-side migration. Typically a person would have connected Microsoft Exchange with Microsoft Outlook installed on an individual’s PC. The Windows PC has a local cache of this data. Usually, this can be copied into a new account in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. When we started Umzuzu nearly 15 years ago, client-side migrations were the norm. They’re more cumbersome than a server-side migration … but, in this case, the server is unavailable. Third-party migration software is recommended (as it is with a server-side migration).
