“Hey Friends,
Whatever you are and whatever your role is, if you’re reading this, it means the internal infrastructure of your company is fully dead. All your computer backups…. Your virtual systems, physical systems, EVERYTHING we touched, are now completely gone from you. AND we’ve taken a great amount of your corporate data prior to encryption. Well, for now, let’s keep all the tears and resentment to ourselves and try to build a constructive dialogue. We’re fully aware of our success and the damage we’ve caused to your company; you’re now locked out from all your internal sources.”
You’ve just read the introduction of the ransom letter my company received last month. These words were all that was within the massive computer systems that manage NorthBay biz, as well as four of our nine FM and AM radio stations in Santa Rosa. These unknown pirates successfully orchestrated a complete and thorough “hack” of all of our editorial servers, music, advertising commercials, station promotions and, perhaps most importantly, our precise and highly customized messaging code that is necessary for our computers to communicate with other network computers, off-campus air personalities and remote employees.
These acts of corporate terrorism, regrettably, are neither new nor uncommon. Thousands of other businesses have suffered from computer hackers and found themselves dead in the water, offline and, in the case of our radio stations, off-the-air. We featured a story a couple years ago when this occurred to a giant car dealership chain. This firm, unfortunately, suffered even worse than we have (or at least we think so).
At the time of the hack in late June, all progress on NorthBay biz’s July issue was wiped out. At 3 a.m. that night, Sonoma county’s most-listened-to news station, most popular country, classic rock and Top 40 stations immediately went silent. Over 70,000 residents count on these radio stations each week, while NorthBay biz reaches nearly 50,000 readers each month, not to mention the advertisers wanting to reach these residents. Led by our chief engineer, Gregg Garcia, as well as Jim Murphy, our broadcasting operations manager, our folks scrambled to restore broadcast capability, further harden our IT security and to notify immediately our listeners and advertisers of what had occurred.
“As for the dollar amount of our ransom, please know that we are not interested in ruining you financially. Send us all of your financial and bank statements as well as your savings accounts information. We shall study them in depth and present to you a fair and reasonable ransom amount. Keep in mind that the faster you pay us, the less damage we will cause.”
If there’s ever been an instance of adding insult to injury, it was to read that the ransom hackers wanted us to send them our confidential financial statements in order to best decide the dollar value of their blackmail! Our mighty little team rejected this notion immediately, (wouldn’t you?) and immediately got to work on literally rebuilding four radio stations and a magazine from scratch. Gregg used a former, unaffected computer server as the basis of his rebuild. We engaged VNR Computer Associates to reset all email, passwords, data inputs and programming. We’ve spent an excess of $150,000 for this rebuild and upgraded security. I’m certain that dollar amount will double before year’s end. We’ve notified our insurance company and, of course, the FBI.
In an attempt to relieve a little bit of the pressure so many of our great employees are under, we even hosted an evening of escapism With a showing of Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning 1. (I don’t want to spoil the movie for you, but Tom and his team must overcome even more sinister computer hackers!)
So, as we like to say at Amaturo Sonoma Media Group, “There’s always something new around here!” While this isn’t quite the sort of thing we were hoping for this month, I’m blessed to have such a dedicated and truly admirable group of teammates who sure know how to get “stuff” done. My sincere thanks to each of you!
Lawrence
