We provided managed IT services for this mid-sized company with over 100 employees.
The problem was over 95% of the employees in this company were not tech savvy. And, due to lack of email security these employees would very often click on malicious links and land themselves in trouble.
On this, we proposed that they have an on-premise backup solution as a precautionary measure in case their systems are attacked by ransomware.
As expected, on one fine day, we got a call from this company saying that they have a message on a couple of their computers stating that their data has been encrypted. And that they need to pay a ransom to get it decrypted.
It looked like the hackers had taken their time and put a lot of thought behind the operation, as they hacked those machines which had critical data. They also infiltrated a file server without which the company couldn’t function.
All in all, they had about 4TB of data in their control which employees in the company used every day.
We had to retrieve this data as quickly as possible to reduce downtime.
We wasted no time and got to work. We first started by preventing any other possible damage that the hackers could inflict.
Then, remember the file server that got hacked?
Fortunately we had a backup of that on cloud. We started retrieving those files to the local computers again. With the download speed the company had, it was estimated that it would take nearly 36 hours to completely restore their data.
But, guess what! The first time around, after 32 hours, the downloading failed and we had to restart the restoration process all over again.
That being said, we painstakingly restored all of the file server data the second time around.
Along with the restoration process the sanitization of all systems was already underway.
Our team worked 24x7 restoring all the data that was lost. However, the company lost 2 weeks of productivity of 100+ employees.
But, no ransom was ever paid!!
Also, it was determined that the loss of productivity plus the cost incurred to retrieve data was far more than having the right solution in place.
As a result, the company agreed to all the suggestions we made. They agreed to have an on-premise backup in place. They also agreed to have proper email security and other additional checks.
With the security tools in place, which always update themselves, their systems were almost impregnable.
The company members were more than happy to have their IT issues managed by us.