How Long Does it Take to Recover from Ransomware?

First the wise guy answers: Too Long and It Depends.

Unfortunately, both are true.

For a lot of companies, 30 to 60 days seems to be the average.

Company size doesn’t seem to be a factor. We recently worked with a smallish company (less than 150 people) and it was 30 days before they were mostly back to semi-normal.

Travelex, the huge foreign currency exchange company was closed for 30 days and they wound up having to file for the equivalent of bankruptcy.

Today’s story is about the University of Vermont Medical Center.

The attack started during the week of October 25th. The system, which includes hospitals, home health and hospice care and which employs a thousand doctors plus 2,000 other medical staff, caused the system to have to cancel procedures such as chemotherapy.

The governor even brought in the National Guard’s cyber team to help recover (don’t you wish you could get that treatment if you had a cyber attack)?

A month later, they are still picking up the pieces.

Just last week they got their electronic medical record system back online and restored their online patient portal. At least medical staff doesn’t have to deal with paper charts any more. Of course, now they have to enter a month’s worth of backlogged patient chart data.

There are still other systems to be restored.

While the online patient portal is working again, new patients still cannot sign up. Also billing and payments are still a problem area, not great for cash flow during a pandemic.

Due to the outages, up to 300 employees have either been transferred or furloughed.

Now translate this to your company.

How long would it take you to recover from a complete cyber meltdown?

Do you have the funds to tide you over?

Do you have a plan to be able to continue to perform your key business functions during this time?

Can your IT team deal with the challenges?

If you don’t plan now, it will take longer to recover in the event that the worst does happen. Some companies have just shut down after a ransomware attack. They do not have the resources to recover.

Many companies hope that it won’t happen. Many companies have been wrong about that. Credit: Threatpost

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