International life sciences company gets hit with ransomware attack losing millions of dollars per day
Endpoint managed service provider success story
Industry: Life Sciences
Job Title: IT Manager
The Challenge
Recovering after a ransomware attack and preventing another one.
Keeping systems running smoothly and securely in a global, rapidly expanding enterprise environment is hard. Throw five acquisitions in the past four years and a pandemic that has forced your entire workforce to go virtual into the mix, and nightmares can become a reality overnight.
The IT team was stretched thin responding to hundreds of tickets per day, regularly onboarding new employees, and manually patching and deploying applications. They were also challenged with meeting the HIPPA, GDPR & ISO 27001 regulations, including a requirement to be 95% patched. Their overburdened, yet capable, IT team couldn’t keep up.
As a prime target, threat actors eventually exploited a vulnerability, took control of key systems and held them for ransom, crippling their entire infrastructure. The IT manager was left scrambling for a solution to help the team rebuild and patch hundreds of machines across the globe, all while losing millions of dollars per day.
“We did not have the logistics to replace hundreds of infected machines. And we needed a way to geographically deploy new machines and repair existing machines that were infected, fast.”
The Process
“The challenge was that we were in the middle of restoring our core infrastructure and we needed to orchestrate not only bringing back critical assistance for users to start working, but we also had to prepare to deploy new computers and VDIs as quickly as possible to get our systems back up and running.”
Finding aid in the midst of a warzone.
In such a pinch, even the process becomes a challenge. Seeing the potential in an autonomous endpoint security managed service solution like Aiden, the life sciences company quickly went all-in.
The Aiden and Life Sciences IT teams quickly went to work defining what should go into their corporate policy document. Standards were reviewed and approved, Aiden’s team of engineers supplied all packages for the environment, and IT used the Aiden Utility to re-deploy to all computers.
The Result
Back to business, in less than a month.
The very next day after engaging Aiden, they were able to restore their most critical office using Aiden’s bare-metal deployment utility.
- What was once kept in complicated spreadsheets is now maintained in a plain-English standards document for endpoint management, including application and bare-metal deployments.
- Immediate access to a central library of approved and secure applications that IT can deploy with confidence and agility.
- IT brings all computers into compliance with a click of a button, no longer worrying about device drivers, regional settings, language packs, or firmware.
“When we got hit, it took out all our existing infrastructure and we had to build everything from scratch. That would have taken up to six months with standard methods. With aiden, we were able to remediate in less than a month…
It’s a game-changer for us.”
The Benefits
An easy to read document for auditors, risk committee, and Head of Cybersecurity
Standardization across the entire environment
A central library of approved and secure applications ready for rapid deployment
“I have a million tickets and emails to respond to so, when I get a new request, all I have to do now is check to see if the application is already in my library. If it is, then with one click it’s done, if it’s not, then Aiden will take care of it while I sleep.”
“Aiden is the content that takes your standard endpoint manager to being a supersonic ballistic missile, because it adds all this other functionality that you never had the opportunity or the time to configure.”