A few years ago I wrapped up a particularly crazy work day performing some seemingly “normal” tasks. Several emails were sent and received, some accounts signed up for with a new online service, and we were remotely connected to a number of servers reviewing data.
What made this specific evening different from most was the why behind those otherwise mundane tasks… The emails were being exchanged with a group of professional hackers and cyber criminals, the new accounts were for a bitcoin exchange service, and the servers we were connected to were riddled with ransomware and now-encrypted, useless data.
The worst had happened. The “if” had become “when”. A company had been attacked, the bad guys had gotten through, and we received the call to try and save the day.
Turning back the clock to “before the boom” as professionals in our space call it, the chain of events leading up to the one, terrible moment were border-line obvious and spanned years of single decisions that added up to a cocktail for disaster. A series of budget cuts led to not having the funds to authorize a modernization project that would have moved their backups immutably, to the cloud. An aging Line of Business application was “too important to risk upending” and left server infrastructure frozen in time at a now-unsupported, unpatched state. An email arrived that was hugely important, very time sensitive, and entirely fake. This, is the recipe for the very “boom” I mentioned before.
The rest was history, the hackers struck and encrypted (but didn’t steal) their data. We received the call, made every effort to find a way out of it, to find there simply wasn’t one. And, as many business staring at a potentially endgame event have done, bitcoin was purchased, the criminals were paid off, and true to their word (this time) the ability to decrypt the data was handed over and many sleepless days later business was returning to normal.
This is just one event of millions like it, and they’re getting worse every year. October, you see, is “Cybersecurity Awareness Month”, and while the vigilance we need to have never gets a break, its still good to take a beat, have the tough conversations, and decide for ourselves, our businesses, and as… people… what is the true cost of not being prepared…
PS - The link to this month's Cybersecurity Awareness "Tech Bytes" segment on SWFL's ABC 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQEQrRawnHI
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