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Getting Caught Off-Guard
Things were going great until March 2020, when –
right at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic – the
company's servers were hit with two cyberattacks
a week apart. "We discovered the first attack when
we couldn't access job files. We tried to access an
offsite backup, and during that process, we were hit
by another attack."
The hackers encrypted the company's files, leaving
SSB with potentially several years of lost data.
"We used a third-party IT provider and didn't realize
the backup they had in place wasn't secure," Byers
says. "Our IT resource tried for weeks to pull data
but couldn't recover anything usable. Realizing
that we had lost job history dating back to 2009
was unnerving."
Before the cyberattack, SSB hosted ProContractor
on-premise. "As a small company, we thought we were
doing the right thing by keeping everything in-house.
It seemed like the most secure option. We thought the
data was in our control and that our servers were safe.
It took the cyberattack for us to see how behind the
times our IT management was."
Challenge
continued
"It took the
cyberattack for us
to see how behind
the times our IT
management was."
Alicia Byers | SSB Controller
