A cyberattack can have horrible consequences for the affected companies. Massive data loss, layoffs, penalty fees for the alck of cybersecurity and high recovery costs are catastrophic scenarios, even though things can go even worse.
The worst happended at The Heritage Company, a telemarketing agency in Arkansas, EE.UU. This company had to fire more than 300 employees, besides to interrupt indefinetely their operations, after not being able to recover at 100% from a devastating ransomware attack that happened recently.
The company decided not to reveal major details from the incident, like the amount of money invested for its recovery or the technical features of the attack. For now, the only official statement of a letter directed to the fired employees, signed by Sandra Franecke, CEO of the company, offering apologies for their bad decision, derived from the loss of thousands of dollars.
In her letter, the CEO says that even though the cyber security team of the company worked hard in the recovery process of the incident, and though they used their own savings to try to keep the company alive, their efforts were in vain, because they did not have enough resources to absord all of the expenses.
“Sadly, around 2 months ago our servers were attacked by a virus that took hostage all of our systems, demanding a ransom in exchange to recovering the access of our cyber resources. Our cyber security department has been doing all they could to make our systems works again, but there’s still a lot fo work to do”, said the CEO in her card.
Franecke concluded her message makign clear that the company will suspend their operations for an undefined time, asking for the understanding of the affected employees and assuring that the next 2nd January will be and update of the situation about the incident. Although there is no favorable prognosis for the restablishment of the operations in The Heritage Company, the CEO says that she will not give up: “My mother created this company more than 60 years ago,a nd i will do whatever i can to keep it alive”, she said.
Sadly, this is not first time that a company appeals to the suspension of perations due a cyber attack. Some months ago, experts in cyber security from the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) reported a similar incident that affected the forensic brand Eurofins Scientific, whose cyber systems were infected with ransomware. As it were reported, after being without operating for 2 months, the brand recovered the access to their systems paying the hackers the ransome they demanded.
Another similar attack occured in ASCO, a belgian company for the development of systems and pieces for aircrafts, which systems were compromised with ransomware, after which directives decided to send home provisionally almost 1500 employees, which working places were completelyout of the line