Last year before the holidays, an Arkansas-based telemarketing firm was hit by ransomware. Their employees at the time didn’t even know they were hit by it, however they felt the repercussions of the attack. More than 300 employees were sent back to their homes and told that it would be best to try looking for another job as a worst-case scenario if they are unable to recover their data.
The attack that happened on October 2019, forced the CEO of the company to send a letter informing their employees of the situation.
“Unfortunately, approximately two months ago our Heritage servers were attacked by malicious software that basically ‘held us hostage for ransom’ and we were forced to pay the crooks to get the ‘key’ just to get our systems back up and running,” wrote Sandra Franecke, the company’s CEO, in the letter sent to employees.
With the initial recovery plan failing, it was estimated to only take 1 week, management decided to suspend operations while the process is ongoing. However, many of the 300 employees are doubtful that the company will be able to survive this situation.
This situation is not as uncommon as you would think it is. In the last few years, many other companies have decided that a ransomware attack was too costly for them to recover and ended up shutting operations down. One example would be a Medical practice in Michigan opting to end their operations 1 year earlier than planned rather then deal with the fallout of a ransomware infection.
Situations like this could have been avoided given that they were able to:
- Have proper security measures implemented to detect and isolate suspicious files
- Had their data recovery plan regularly tested or had on implemented in the first place.
If you would like to learn how we at CT Link Systems, Inc. can help you company better secure your IT environment or even ensure that you have a good BCDR plan in place, Contact us at 8935 9515 and we would be happy to help you!