Beat Ransomware: 4 Lessons From The Trenches

By Derrick Wlodarz

It was a Friday afternoon this past August, with the staff at my IT managed services company FireLogic winding down operations leading into the weekend. Out of nowhere, a call comes in from a new client we have never worked with sending out an SOS. A few emails and phone calls later, and we finally had a clear picture of what the situation looked like.

This client is a midsize vendor for the aerospace defense industry that was infected with ransomware via one of their core servers, and this malware was suspected of spreading to most systems at their primary location. In their talks with a security incident response firm, the decision was made by management to “nuke and rebuild” the entire IT infrastructure from scratch. My firm, FireLogic, was called in to provide the boots on the ground to help with reimaging their entire PC fleet — a task which took almost two weeks to complete, including a great amount of overtime work.