Why do I keep getting this pop-up?

I originally was not going to post this, but received permission from the person it happened to… so..

Before our life in quarantine, there was a time were I was called in to help with a serious IT situation. A friend referred me to a doctor’s office that was having a computer issue. They were not able to access any of their records and they kept getting a error message. I was thinking it was a network issue or permissions or either the switch or server failed, and that was causing the problem and giving the office staff an error message. When I arrived at the doctor’s office, I started with a visual inspection of the server and networking gear, everything looks normal here. NO error messages or red lights displayed.

It turned out it was not as I originally thought, it was MUCH WORSE.

‘YOUR FILES HAVE BEEN ENCRYPTED’, my heart sank. This doctor’s office has been the victim of ransomware. The only response I had for the office staff that was sitting in front of me was ‘interesting’. <The definition of interesting is “Oh God. Oh God. We are all going to die>

This was not a regular client of mine and I was only called in to help their own IT staff, who happened to be the office manager. So, the office manager sat down and discussed the problem and I gave her a couple of options, in which in reality there is only one. No, it is not to pay! I took the backups from the previous night and performed a full restore of the affected systems, thankfully there were backups.

The cost was high, Too High.

Cost in Time

The doctor’s business office was completely down for an entire day. 1 day

Once the systems were back, the staff had to recreate all of the transactions and data from the time the backups were taken to current time. This happened to be 2 full days, since the previous nights backup did not run. 2 days

It took the business office another 2 days to get start producing bills again. 2 days

Total: 5 Days

Money

This is just a small sample of the monetary cost:

Loss of income or at least a delay in cash flow.

The staff was still getting paid for sitting there, having to write everything down on paper.

The overtime that was paid out to the staff to recreate the records.

And my billable time.

Call me today to schedule a check of your systems to ensure that this does not happen to you.