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You knew it was strange...
AND YOU CLICKED IT ANY WAY!!
I've been doing IT lately. A few weeks ago, I get a frantic call from a client demanding I get to their office NOWZ! I cancel another appointment and rush there thinking that this had better be bad. I get to the office and they show me a screen that looks like this:
Oh, yeah. It's bad.
For those who don't know, this is ransomware, a nasty one called Cryptolocker. It infects a machine and scans it and all drives it's linked to. It then encrypts all files with a randomized 128-bit key. So all both servers full of data were locked. It can normally be fixed with backups. That's where this story leaves "that sucks" to "customer suck."
When my company took on this client, we told them about all the things we recommended for a business of this type: double backup, nightly drops, all that jazz.
That was too expensive for them, they said. They also didn't want shadow copies on "for security reasons." They had one bit of backup software that overwrote all the information from before daily.
To compound this, there's normally a bit that comes up telling you "If you want your stuff back, pay here." The client decided that they wanted to do that, despite my advice. Well, the anti-virus managed to catch and kill that part. So they couldn't.
I took it home and worked for two days trying to find the key. No go. I finally tell them it's no good. Curious, I asked them how this happened.
He said he got an email from an associate that had no message, no subject, just a link. I asked the client if this person did that often, just sending a link. The answer was no, they normally send a message saying why they were sending it. The client thought it was weird.
And they clicked it anyway.
They fired us but no one in the company was sad about it. The loss of money was bad but this client made this whole ordeal worse than it should have been.
I've been doing IT lately. A few weeks ago, I get a frantic call from a client demanding I get to their office NOWZ! I cancel another appointment and rush there thinking that this had better be bad. I get to the office and they show me a screen that looks like this:
Oh, yeah. It's bad.
For those who don't know, this is ransomware, a nasty one called Cryptolocker. It infects a machine and scans it and all drives it's linked to. It then encrypts all files with a randomized 128-bit key. So all both servers full of data were locked. It can normally be fixed with backups. That's where this story leaves "that sucks" to "customer suck."
When my company took on this client, we told them about all the things we recommended for a business of this type: double backup, nightly drops, all that jazz.
That was too expensive for them, they said. They also didn't want shadow copies on "for security reasons." They had one bit of backup software that overwrote all the information from before daily.
To compound this, there's normally a bit that comes up telling you "If you want your stuff back, pay here." The client decided that they wanted to do that, despite my advice. Well, the anti-virus managed to catch and kill that part. So they couldn't.
I took it home and worked for two days trying to find the key. No go. I finally tell them it's no good. Curious, I asked them how this happened.
He said he got an email from an associate that had no message, no subject, just a link. I asked the client if this person did that often, just sending a link. The answer was no, they normally send a message saying why they were sending it. The client thought it was weird.
And they clicked it anyway.
They fired us but no one in the company was sad about it. The loss of money was bad but this client made this whole ordeal worse than it should have been.
), with all the downsides like requiring administrative privileges, and (b) conflicted horribly with our antivirus software, which their support uninstalled (
) without installing or recommending a non-conflicting substitute (
).
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