Community College Provides Example of IT Investment's Importance
Once again, hackers are making waves in the news media and recently, a community college in Michigan is the unfortunate subject of the news. The school is Kellogg Community College, a smaller school whose subjection to these cyber attacks has resulted in days of lost time. The attack occurred on Friday, April 29 and they had to be shut down while the issue was resolved. It took until May 4 (five days later) for the issue to be resolved. At this point, it is unknown if they had ultimately been forced to pay the ransom (which only reinforces the perpetrators to do the same thing again).
Why does this matter to me?
Kellogg Community College is not particularly large with under 250 employees. They are probably just big enough to start cracking headlines, but are an excellent example of how many more bad actors are targeting the medium to small organizations. It's a reminder to us at Ridge Support and hopefully to our clients that maintaining strong IT infrastructure and security practices is of great importance.
Since this college is small enough, many more organizations can relate - imagine your organization being subjected to this. The college was down for five days until a resolution could be had. What would the costs of just this downtime be for your organization? Those costs are why it's always good not only to have practices in place to prevent them, but also plans for how your organization would respond to an issue like this to minimize downtime and costs.
Ridge Support is happy to assist with any IT needs, including incident response plans. Should you have questions about this or any other IT concerns, please feel free to reach out to our office.
