There’s never a good time for an organisation to fall victim to a ransomware attack, but for Matthew Day, CIO of Langs Building Supplies, a phone call on May 20, 2021 came at perhaps the worst possible time – before dawn, just as he was about to take time off for the first time in a long time.
“I was going on my holidays. But I got a phone call at four o’clock in the morning, saying basically ‘I can’t log in, what’s going on?'” he says.
Day got up and made the 30-minute drive to his office in Brisbane, Australia where the construction, building supplies and home-building company is based, all the while thinking about what the problem could be, perhaps a hardware failure or an unplanned outage?
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The answer became obvious when he arrived and tried to bring up the systems – a ransom note appeared and said: “You’ve been hacked.”
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Langs had fallen victim to Lorenz ransomware and the cyber criminals who had encrypted multiple servers and thousands of files were demanding a payment of $15 million in Bitcoin in exchange for the decryption key. Like
