The Bottom Line: Backup systems with failed restoration tests and MFA bypasses via fatigue-push flooding or adversary-in-the-middle attacks are critical failure points in practice.
In a Reddit discussion, IT administrators and cybersecurity experts describe cases in which automated backup systems failed during recovery and modern authentication mechanisms were bypassed through fatigue attacks and man-in-the-middle techniques.
A common source of error is uncritical reliance on backup dashboard signals. Administrators report cases in which central control interfaces displayed green status messages for months and showed successful daily data backups — yet neither recovery nor data integrity was actually guaranteed in the event of hardware failures or ransomware attacks. The causes range from undetected corrupted data blocks on storage media to faulty configuration rules that excluded entire database components from backups. One IT director described a scenario in which malware first compromised backup servers accessible on the network and deleted their images before the attack moved to production systems. The key insight from discussion participants is this: a backup only exists once recovery has been successfully tested on isolated, network-disconnected storage media and documented.
A second critical failure point concerns bypassing multi-factor authentication through psychological and technical attack patterns. The so-called MFA fatigue-push flooding describes a tactic in which attackers first steal passwords through phishing and then bombard the victim’s mobile device with dozens of authentication requests per second — often at night. Users then confirm the login from sleep deprivation, inattention, or in the mistaken belief of a system error, to stop the device from vibrating.
A second variant is adversary-in-the-middle attacks: attackers place a fake login page between user and genuine service. They capture passwords and MFA tokens entered there and steal the session cookie generated in the background by the browser. Using this cookie, criminals log into the corporate network from any computer worldwide without further password or MFA prompts.
The discussions show that purely technical controls without continuous, practice-oriented employee training on these specialized attack tactics remain ineffective. In particular, SMS-based authentication codes are criticized because they are vulnerable to SIM-swapping attacks.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published June 16, 2026
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