MY STORY
I’m here to assist in safeguarding your business against cyber threats. And this is my story why.

This story is based on live events that happened in the past.

There was a company, yes you read it correct. There was a wealthy company with more then 500+ employees. And why I say “WAS” because It doesn’t exist anymore today.

And why it doesn’t exist anymore is because they were attacked by hackers and they encrypted their whole IT systems. Everything like files (Word, excel, outlook) software, operating systems etc. everything was encrypted. There was no data or IT system that cloud be used by the employees. There were only a few texts file left behind from the hackers how to decrypt the data of that company.

An easy solution would be to roll back their IT systems and data with a backup. But their backup’s were also encrypted. The hackers were active in the company IT systems for weeks, months unnoticed. So, recovery from a backup was not an option anymore. And the company had no Disaster recovery plan or an off-side backup location, isolated from their primary IT systems. The secondary backup locations was also encrypted.

So, what was in these texts files left behind? The hackers gave information that they got the key for decrypting the company’s data. But before you will get the key. You needed to pay in BTC (bitcoins). This is Untrack able digital money. The price the company needed to pay was millions in euros (dollar currency was the same price).

The company did not have this kind of money and did also not wanted to sponsor Cybercrime. The other problem was that there were no guarantees they would receive the key(software) to decrypt the company’s data.
So, they asked(hired) a well know anti-virus decrypting company to recover their data.
The well know anti-virus decrypting company did his best and could recover 80% of the data. With 20% of that data that cloud not be recovered.

But the problem with 80% data recovered of example a MS Word file or MS Excel files is still nothing. You are still missing 20% of a file. 20% missing of a file wil remain a file in an incomplete state.
In the meantime, the company’s data was encrypted for weeks. They lost customers, got heavy law suites, employees sitting at homes, some employees started to create the data from scratch, but this would take years.
The company was wealthy enough to go on for several months. But think of this with all the extra problems that arise like mentioned above. Also, private situation of employees losing jobs and get stress. These employees got mortgages, loans, children, animals and family who they cloud not support anymore because of losing their jobs. The company was on the break of bankrupt.

For me it was heart-breaking to see this happen to the company and his employees. From that moment I changed my experience towards Cybersecurity, teaching and expressing why you need Cybersecurity. If you think you will be never be a victim of cybercrime you are wrong.
Every cent, dollar, euro etc. a Cybercriminal will get is a win situation for him. He does not care what damage he inflicted to the business or people behind it.

So, a story short: That company did never recover from their hack and was eventually declared bankrupt.
I never want this to happen again to you and every hard-working people out there. And that’s why I am teaching you my knowledge why Cyber security is IMPORTANT and a MUST.

I hope to inspire you to protect your valuable IT systems against cyber threats

Here are some statistics right here. The average large organization has to look at about 17,000 malware warnings each week, and of course, that’s a lot. About 99 days are the median amount of time for an organization to discover a security breach. It takes less than 48 hours for attackers to have complete control of a network. €(dollar) 4 million is the average cost of data breach to a company.