Our client is a local retail franchisee of a national brand. On August 3, at 10:04 pm EDT, hackers accessed a compromised admin account on the company-wide backup system. They used this access to deploy malicious ransomware on each location’s Point of Sale server. When stores opened the next day, the opening staff at each site saw a seemingly routine message on the compromised system that a software update had been applied and a reboot was necessary. They dutifully rebooted and their systems immediately became encrypted with ransomware and became unusable.

Our client was the only store not affected. The corporate office asked him what he did differently, and he mentioned that he had signed up for our Cyber Security protection package. Then my client called me, and we looked into the events of the previous night.

Our Internet filtering system, part of our Cyber Security service package, had blocked five different attempts by this malware to acquire the necessary encryption key to encrypt the server data at my client’s site. Not only that, our anti-malware solution, also part of our Cyber Security service package, had identified and quarantined five related executable programs on the system. All of this had taken place between 10:00 pm and 10:03 pm EDT that same fateful August night – yes just as the hackers were infiltrating the system.

Though our client was not affected, other franchisees around the country were closed for up to two days – with no revenue coming in.

The moral? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. More specifically, join our other IT managed clients and subscribe to our Cyber Security solution. If you’d like to discuss how we can protect you and your data from these kinds of attacks, please call us at (303) 335-6744