Save My Data

Welcome to the first edition of my newsletter Save My Data. It's something we all need to think about. Cybercrime in 2023 cost businesses and individuals a total of $8 Trillion. Staggering! We will share stories of data villains, data heroes, and practical tips for making sure that your lifeblood...your data...is recoverable and life can go on.

Let's start with a data villain. A woman at a UK firm "was previously a Director of her company but resigned in March 2018. She told police she had been angry with its director, a former business associate.

She knew the password to the main company email account and used this access to force a password reset for the ‘Dropbox For Business’ account where the company held all its documentation including payroll details, design and print material, customer records, and so on.

Then over a period of about 5-6 hours on Bank Holiday Monday in August 2018, she used her unauthorized administrator access to permanently delete every single file that the company held, which was over 5,000 documents. To do so she had to remove all other users’ access to the documents, then delete them, and then remove the files from the trash folder so that they were permanently deleted.

The remaining director and company staff came to work the next morning and found that their entire business had effectively been deleted overnight. The company spent $49,000 to try and recreate some of their core data and start trading again but it was not enough to save the business and it collapsed with approximately 60 job losses.

The personal cost to the Director, as he tried to salvage the firm was in excess of $84,000, and the psychological impact was very heavy."

Two quick lessons from this story:

1. Make sure to disable passwords for an employee BEFORE they get word they're terminated or before they walk out from resigning.
2. You can't count on your online services to back data up the way you need. Get a backup that you control that works on your schedule.

Contact Verified Backups for a free consultation. Save your data!