IT Lessons From a Real Tampa Bay Ransomware Case

Note: identifying details in this story have been changed to protect the business involved. The pattern of what happened, and why, is common enough that the lessons apply broadly to small offices across Tampa Bay.

What happened

A small local office received a phishing email disguised as a vendor invoice. One employee opened the attachment. Within hours, ransomware had spread across the shared network drive, encrypting files as it went. The business was down for four days while recovery efforts got underway.

Why the backup didn't save them

The office did have a backup drive. The problem was how it was connected. It was mapped on the network the same way any other shared drive would be, using the same login credentials as the rest of the environment. When the ransomware spread, it reached the backup too, because nothing separated it from the systems it was supposed to protect against exactly this kind of event.

Three lessons for any small office

•      Backups need to be isolated from the main network, not simply copied to another drive

•      Multi factor authentication on email would have made the original phishing email far harder to weaponize

•      Security awareness training works best as an ongoing habit, not a one time onboarding item

How to check your own setup

The most important question to ask about your own backup: if every other machine on your network got encrypted tomorrow, would your backup survive untouched? If the honest answer is unclear, that is worth a conversation with your IT provider. Main Event MSP builds backup and disaster recovery with true isolation in mind, specifically to prevent this scenario.