2022 - The unavoidable pain of backups by Nicolas Devillers, Anaïs Gantet & Mouad Abouhali

Why Target Backup Software

Airbus Security Lab researchers evaluate NetBackup because backups are resilience-critical, widely deployed (claimed 87% of Fortune Global 500), highly privileged, and move sensitive data at scale. Prior work includes Immunity’s remote execution and Google’s remote code execution disclosures.

NetBackup Domain Architecture

A domain includes clients on backed-up systems, a primary server orchestrating policies and catalogs, media servers storing to disk or tape libraries, and OpsCenter for monitoring. Trust flows from OpsCenter to primaries and from primaries to clients and media servers.

Research Methodology

The team guided analysis with security questions: attackers need internal knowledge and tooling; a NetBackup client can compromise higher-privilege components; clients may pivot laterally; and attackers may target metadata needed for restore. They iterated documentation review, operator interviews, lab setup, and binary analysis—planning to present four findings and an end-to-end attack scenario, though detailed vulnerabilities extend beyond introductory architecture coverage in the available recording.