Each Director maintained duplicate components of the system. Every couple of months they would meet for breakfast and practice rebuilding the system.
IIRC he said "80%+ companies that lose their data, are gone in two years"
Telemarketing firm? It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch LOL!
Why does he/she think the employees can take the company to court and make them pay a settlement? Does Arkansas have some law that you have to stay in business and keep people employed?
I feel for the employees but a telemarketing company biting the dust is no great loss and it reflects on the IT department.
Mega props to the hackers.
300 employees at a telemarketing company=boiler room.
Eff em...
I can’t even leave the ringers on my phone on because of these bastards.
Phone rings every 10 minutes all day long, every last call is either telemarketers or scammers.
Telemarketers? Is that why my phone isn’t ringing as much this week?
It appears that the extortionists here didn’t supply a key that worked after the ransom was paid.
If I had the company, I’d sue the Crypto currency exchange for a refund. The Bitcoin and other “exchanges” should be held civilly liable for their role in the criminal enterprise. Shut them down (or make them start tracking the money) and the problem will go away.
It’s hilarious. They are running Windows. But if they paid Microsoft and their IT department to deploy the infrastructure on even Microsoft’s Azure cloud, this would not have happened. Microsoft knows they make crap operating systems for the commodity PC market, and they don’t care. Microsoft’s future business model will be to back away from Windows. I knew their operating system products were total crap even 30+ years ago. It’s so funny to see them betting their future on Linux in the Cloud and their application products. They may even go the way of Sun eventually a send up as has-been in 10 years, with some company buying their Cloud assets.
There is no excuse for any company or government entity to ever succumb to ransomware. I guess they saved a lot of money by skipping backups.
[[malicious software that basically ‘held us hostage for ransom’ ]]
huh? They don’t do backups? You can get FREE backup software like macrium reflect, that runs before windows even starts so you can get back to a safe point easy peasy- Run something like rollbackRX- do a system restore and ransom crap is gone-
OK, folks, make fun because a telemarketer . BUT, this is happening to many large companies and cities/county governments and it costs the taxpayers big time. One huge downsize is the court systems. Many crooks are let go simply because there is not access to data. This is a widespread problem.
At home 'off grid' copies ... great idea.
Gentile reminder to the Freeper community:
- Back up your home systems. Automated back up to an inexpenseive terabyte drive is relatively easy to set up
- Update your anti virus / anti malware application and run to clean up your system
- Make sure you have a patched operating system
- perform your annual system maintenance (delete files no longer used, defrag your drive and registry)
An Arkansas-based telemarketing firm
Did the hackers spoof the phone number to gain access? Maybe turn about is fair play. No sympathy from me for telemarketing leaches.
For all of you who missed Dave Berry’s year in review article where he discuss ransomware attacks. “Ransomware is sort of like a Microsoft Windows update except someone knows how to fix it.”
If you have a company large enough to afford 300 employees, there is no excuse for not having an IT staff skilled enough and with foresight enough to prevent this happening.
Ransomware can’t affect back-ups that are off-site and off-line.
Our company had a ransomeware attack one time that was on one of the network servers. The company had a backup and wiped the server and put the backup on it.
Backup and backup again. If practical also backup online.