Alice hurried through the parking garage as she fumbled with her briefcase and keys. It had been a hectic morning, and she was running on just 3 hours of sleep.

Traffic had been the worst in recent months as she sat with her two kids, one in Grade 3 and the other in Kindergarten. The older one, David, had a temper tantrum the night before, refusing to go to bed. It was well after midnight before he drifted off to sleep.

Alice had to stay up another 2 hours to finish the documents she had promised her client and finally drifted off to sleep around 3:20 am.

When her alarm clock came to life at 6:30 am, she was a wreck. Fortunately for her, both kids were cooperative in the morning and were ready to go a full 5 minutes ahead of schedule. However, her moment of good fortune quickly faded as she pulled out onto the freeway as the cars crowded around her in virtual stillness. It was a parking lot that morning.

Arriving at her desk finally, she pulled out her laptop and fired it up. Her phone had buzzed multiple times with emails during her commute and she finally had a chance to catch up on those messages.

She quickly replied to a few messages and deleted others after a quick read. Then came the message that was entitled “Updated Contract.” It had come in from someone she hadn’t talked to in several years. Normally she would think twice before opening it, but this morning, her curiosity got the better of her in her harried state.

With little sleep and fueled by adrenaline, she opened the email, and clicked on the fake DocuSign link. A black window flashed for a split second the moment she clicked the link and disappeared. That was when she realized she probably shouldn’t have done that. She had a brief memory of the cyber awareness course that she was required to take a couple of years earlier when she started the job, but she couldn’t quite remember what she was told about how to tell if an email was malicious or not.

She stared at her computer in a moment of panic and tried opening up a couple of Word and Excel documents. Aside from it being a tad slower than usual, everything seemed normal.

“Phew.” she sighed with relief. She wondered why the document never opened but decided against clicking the link again.

It would be nearly an hour later before her colleagues would start popping up in their cubicles. “Hey guys, are you seeing this?” one of her co-workers asked.

All of their files had started getting renamed with the words “encrypted” at the end of the file name. When her manager tried to open up one of the files, they got a popup message: “Oooops… All of your files are encrypted.” There was a countdown timer and a message about sending Bitcoin to a hacker’s address.

Alice had just launched a ransomware attack on her workplace. They would be down for nearly three full weeks as their IT team was brought in to try to recover their systems. Their entire company was dead in the water. No access to files. No access to accounting. No access to their CRM. No access even to their email, which was still hosted on a server at their office.

Story is based on real-life events.
Written by: Vince Fung
(c) 2022 Vince Fung & Expera IT – Unauthorized copying or use of this content is strictly prohibited.