Accend has been a Global Security Solutions provider for several clients when their networks were attacked by ransomware. Their locations are in different parts of the world. They look to us to provide rapid security solutions.
When both of our east coast clients were attacked by different variations of ransomware, we were called upon to implement tailored security solutions to remediate and restore their services as soon as possible so they could quickly be back in business operating normally. Luckily, with our talented team and a variety of resources, we were able to provide the skillsets our clients needed in a short period of time. We understood the urgency and thus quickly started working on resolving the issue.
Nuance is one of our east coast clients. They were hit by the Petya virus, which cost them $90M to restore their entire infrastructure (and restoration of services may still be on going). They had over 70 worldwide locations, including locations in Canada and Melbourne, Australia. They had no security at all in any of their systems. One click executed and voila, the virus cascaded and impacted almost all of their systems. It was so severe that our Global Security Solutions USA team and other IT partners were called in to work long hours round the clock, including weekends and nights, to tighten up security using Cisco FirePower at all 70+ locations around the world.
Here is what our partner had to say about this incident. According to Stewart Grey, Solutions Engineer of Conres, “We executed the ‘cut off and kill plan.’ It took dozens of networking R&S and security professionals to deploy over 100 firewalls to all parts of the globe. We took a project that should have taken 6 – 8 months and executed and successfully remediated the problem in 6 weeks.”
Another case is a healthcare client, Chesapeake Health Care in Salisbury, Maryland that was hit by ransomware that crippled some of their Windows infrastructure, including their Exchange 2007 server. They had about 400 users who primarily used Outlook Web Access (OWA) to access their emails, and OWA became useless to them. Once we received the email about needing our help, we jumped on it right away. They wanted to migrate to Office 365, and our Microsoft Exchange Solutions Architect helped them with the migration so they were up and running in a matter of two weeks.
Recently, as part of our global security solutions in California, we received another crisis call from a client in the Tri-Valley location in Northern California. The client was hit with ransomware for the second time, and they actually paid the ransom to get their service back for an undisclosed amount. They had about 200 users and needed several things done such as data recovery, migration to the cloud, and security. They ended up hiring a different IT vendor to support them but, unfortunately, that was not enough and we were called upon.
One last example is a request we received from a company residing in China when they needed a VPN service for their business. That was an interesting case because the business needed to register with the Chinese government and agree to have their site’s traffic monitored by it.
The above cases are part of our Global Security Solutions in California, the East Coast, and worldwide. Being in California does not restrict the location of our clients, and we have proved that we can support clients with our international security solutions, providing them with Cyber Security solutions while abiding by local and international laws.