The October 2020 ransomware that infected the network of Hackney Council in East London has had lasting repercussions. Many of its services, including housing benefits and social care, were unavailable for about a year. While Hackney did not pay the ransom demand, the associated costs to the Council have exceeded £12 million ($14.8 million).
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- Think about that: more than two years and they still don’t have all their services back. The question is how would you do in their situation? Yeah, you’ve got the isolated backups, but have you tried restoring key services — e.g., rebuild AD from those backups? Restore and run a payroll? Open/close the financials? With all the services you’ve got in the cloud and/or outsourced, do you have a handle on all the ETL/API gateways you’re now using? Any critical processes still running on a user workstation? Who can you call for help? Not trying to scare you, just want to make sure you’re covering all your bases.
- This is an important point to reiterate regarding ransomware attacks, the recovery from an attack, whether you pay the ransom or not, can take months if not years. Ransomware really is a case of where the prevention is better than the cure.
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