The moment you realize you are not alone
Some years back when I first started setting up my first web servers. I built a domain server, a website server, an email server, and a database server. Everything was running smoothly. Then after about one month or so, I came into the office and looked over at the server monitor and noticed the mouse moving across the screen. I thought, “What’s going on?”. There were a couple of menu’s being clicked. Then it hit me, I’ve been hacked!
My first emotion was anger after all these are my machines, I spent many, many hours getting them configured just right. This was a big lesson for me. Instead of assuming that everyone is nice, and everyone respects your space that doesn’t mean anything when you put yourself out there on the internet. People will just hack, hold your work for ransom. Why, because you didn’t think that would happen to you.
I’ve had many, many calls when someone has come to work after a weekend, or a holiday suddenly something is just not the way it should be, or after an innocent restart there’s now ransomware.
Sure, some break-ups are hard to do, but this decision should be an easy one this time.
How can we protect ourselves?
Well, as I found out you have to be proactive about it. You have to make sure every machine that accesses the internet (and especially servers) have had every single patch/update installed all the time, then make sure you have a very good anti-virus, anti-spam, and a good firewall. Then make sure that the virus software runs daily, scans continuously and make sure you check each machine daily, weekly and monthly. Test your backups by restoring them to a physical or virtual machines, you don’t want a backup failing when you need it.
That’s just too much time, how can I do my job if I have to do this on all my employees’ machines?
Well, you certainly would find the time, if you got ransomware at a price of about 15 bitcoins ($45,000 dollars) or you’d certainly feel bad if you had the opportunity to do something and didn’t.
We offer “Managed Services” to help you as much as possible to avoid the bad guys
Our managed service plans offer several layers of protection. In every case when we start a new managed service customer the machines have been unpatched and unprotected with on average 50 or more needed security patches. In addition, anti-virus is non-existent, isn’t scanning on a regular basis or its freeware.
Neil was right, breaking up is hard to do
Sure, some break-ups are hard to do, but we need to break up with the hackers. This decision should be an easy one this time (a no-brainer). Want to know how much your outage would cost? We can tell you. Call us for a personal outage cost comparison you’ll be surprised. We’re waiting to help you.
So, what happened to the hacked server?
Well, I immediately unplugged it from the network and restarted it. It would not start, the hacker had done his job. I spend the next 70 hours straight (with just a few 1/2 hour naps), getting the email server back online. I make sure things are up to date, patched and cared for every minute now and you should too.