It’s hard to believe someone, like our client Charley, who so careful and aware of cyber threats, would find himself one click away from a ransomware disaster.

Charley has been a NAP Technologies client for 3 years, and was always cautious and quick to follow our advice, but he suddenly found himself just one click away from falling victim to a ransomware scheme – which would have put his expansion plans on hold Indefinitely.

How did this happen? Like what happens in a lot of these critical events, the unknowing culprit was a trusted party. In this case Calvin, a long time family friend and trusted neighbor came into the office to work on summer break. The business was expanding and when Calvin needed a computer to work on. Charley quickly gave Calvin access to the server to do his work…after all, this was Calvin, Charley knew him since he was nine years old having grown up with his son.

Calvin like most millennials just could not resist the call of social media and streaming music during his work day. Even though this was against company policies, he thought he would just catch up with his friends to tell them he was working at Charley’s company for the summer.

Less than an hour after logging on to the network, Calvin saw something very unusual come up on his screen – a skull and crossbones message demanding ransom from someone claiming to be the “Terminator”. After staring at it for more than 5 minutes, Calvin simply decided to log of his account. Literally two minutes later, he was summoned to an office phone where a NAP TECH was asking him what was going on?

In less than 20 minutes, a NAP Tech was on-site surgically removing the ransomware malware. Luckily for Charley, the ransomware was removed just one click shy of shutting down the business.

In a digital world where everything you worked for can be gone in a split second, your business needs to be proactive. Not reactive.