This is stories from the trenches. These are real world examples demonstrating issues we have experienced.

Property Management Ransomware

A remote access account was compromised from an email phishing attack. The attacker was able to access one computer and install ransomware and it started attacking the network. Since everything was securely backed up, everything was restored and the company lost about half a days work.

Disaster Recovery Planning

A client came to us and said we need a solution that will allow our servers to stay up in the event of a hardware failure. They wanted to know what we thought about keeping a spare server on standby.I informed that even if we did, it could take hours to restore the backup.

We implemented a solution that creates a virtual stand-by of the physical server. This virutal server is updated hourly. In the event that the physical server does go down, the virtual server will start up and replace it. They can be back up in minutes instead of hours.

Network Monitoring

A client had a camera system installed by another vender and it was exposed to the Internet so that the client could see the cameras from anywhere. We obiously have little control over this device. However, our network monitoring alerted us to a huge amount of network traffic coming from the DVR. Looking at the firewall logs we could see that all this traffic was coming from over-seas. We were able to quickly block the attack and notify the customer and the third-party vendor.

Covid-19 Work From Home

When the Covid crysis hit our customers, we were inundated with phone calls about work from home. How much is it going to cost? How hard is it going be to get it implemented?

We explained to our clients, relax, you already have the firewall in-place that was recommened. We have already have the system in place to deploy the VPN clients to your employees and laptops. Sure it was a busy couple of weeks educating workers how to remote into their offices. But it was not that big of a deal.