Author: Michael Robins, Service Delivery Engineer
When I was approached to do this story, I had several recent wins on my mind. Some were personal, and others for Team Watchmen. Ultimately, I decided to focus on an Umbrella win. A win for us that turned into a win for our clients.
WannaCry Ransomware Attacks
We work in a field where the odds are stacked against us. Where small problems can eventually grow into monsters. This “monster” was bringing the world to its knees, but we were prepared to defend our Castle.
Our defense started with a simple email. Many of the Umbrella engineers subscribe to email lists from technology websites to stay up to date on current events in the IT world. This, at its core, is what saved the day. One of our Knights sent out an email about WannaCry.
WannaCry is a piece of Ransomware that was destroying data around the world at an alarming rate. A day after the attack was launched, there were more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries affected. The attack was primarily targeting older operating systems like Windows XP, and Windows 8. Thirteen minutes after getting the email, our order of Knights began responding to this email. We learned that there was already a patch to stop WannaCry before it made its way into our Castle.
We began pushing out this patch to our clients. The patch went to all the PCs and servers that needed it, and I’m happy to say that we didn’t see a single instance of WannaCry on any of our networks.
This is truly a win! Instead of trying to fix a problem after the fact, we prevented the problem from ever occurring. This is what we strive to do individually, at a team level, and as an organization as a whole. We’ve got IT covered.
