The importance of backup and restoration of data to a business

You rarely hear of stories about real people where real hackers have ruined their business, however, in the back of your mind, you know it happens. Here is a story about an Australian business that did not have a backup service in place and as a result, they have been foreclosed.

This Australian based company operated in the retail market with a medium employee size (20-50 staff). Their system operated off a custom intranet application where the company can track online orders and staff notices. Their emailing system is also connected to the company intranet making it easy to flag new sales, leads and bulk orders.

Staff are very intuitive and keep on top of competitor deals to make sure that their company is competitive in the marketplace. In doing this staff sign up to competitor mailing lists to help them analyse content. This causes a lot of promotional emails to be sent to staff every day.

Just like any other day a staff member receives a ‘competitor’ promotional email. It seemed like an awesome deal, so they clicked on the information to find out more.

What happened next…

Due to a combination of poor endpoint protection, firewall setup, lack of intranet application updates and no business data back-ups, the perfect storm was created for a ransomware attack. This link allowed a virus to get into the intranet system and within a matter of minutes the hackers had taken over the company intranet accessing all files and preventing all current employees from accessing any information. This caused an instant meltdown within the company.

Within an hour the ransomware hackers were demanding in excess of $140,000 AUD to give back access to the company’s system.

For the remainder of the day, all other employees were sent home whilst the executive team tried to resolve this issue. The risk of paying these internet thieves and still not receiving their services back was too high.

Due to never having backed up their systems, restoring from a backup wasn’t an option. The only data that could be recovered was any documents sent via a 3rd party data sharing software. This wasn’t enough to get the company up and running again…

How to avoid this happening to you

With Bendigo Telco’s back up as a service (BaaS), you’ll know that your data is safe and you’ll always be able to recover the lost data. Don’t have an “it won’t happen to me” attitude because, in all honesty, it can happen to anyone if you don’t put precautions in place. Contact our data experts today on 03 5454 1575 and get a free consult as to how BaaS can work for you.

It’s better to be safe than sorry!