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Anatomy of a Cyber Attack

It started simply enough. A normal day working from home for my company, a medical products distributor. I’ve been monitoring incoming orders and shipments to keep a handle on things. My daughter asked to use my computer when I take a coffee break.

Sure, I said.
But when I came back It was a shocker of a message I got:

“YOUR DATA AND FILES ARE NOW UNDER OUR CONTROL. DON’T TRY TO DO ANYTHING, OR WE WILL RELEASE YOUR CUSTOMER FILES TO PUBLIC. OUR DEMANDS WILL COME TOMORROW.”

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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.




NPV CLIENTS are able to recover their data quickly---

Most times requiring only a day or two because of NPV’s IT unique IT architecture and design. It requires experience and depth of knowledge to outsmart the hackers, which NPV demonstrates. Contact NPV and put us to work on your company’s protection team.”

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.