I didn’t know what to do, so I called my best computer-savvy employee to get a read on it. He didn’t have any ideas. So, I waited; then I got the message:
“WE DEMAND YOU DEPOSIT $175,000 IN BITCOIN TO THIS LOCATION WITHIN 12 HOURS.”DO NOT IGNORE OUR DEMAND OR NOTIFY AUTHORITIES OR WE WILL RELEASE YOUR INFORMATION TO THE PUBLIC!!”
What to do? My business was shut down. Customers are calling about their orders. My people are helpless. My IT service was hopeless, they said to pay the ransom.
All I know is I’m losing business and money big time.
A simple mistake brought me a world of trouble. I should never had let my daughter use my business machine to do games and chat online. I wished I paid more attention to my operations guy who said: “we need to prepare against ransomware attacks. It’s more common than you think.” If this were an NPV customer, they would call us and we would re-establish a working system back to normal in a day. If, not, the options are bleak: On average, organizations pay a ransom of $233,217. There’s a 19-day system downtime following a ransomware attack.