In the fluorescent-lit maze of cubicles at Apex Solutions, Alex was drowning in a sea of spreadsheets. The quarterly report was due in two hours, and his trial version of WPS Office had just expired, locking him out of the vital xlsx formulas he needed to combine three years of data.
He finished the report using a authorized, open-source spreadsheet editor, sweating profusely. In the fluorescent-lit maze of cubicles at Apex
Panic set in as he realized his quarterly report—and the sensitive company data attached to it—was being encrypted, and likely exfiltrated, by a ransomware attack. Panic set in as he realized his quarterly
Recommend to expensive office suites. Detail how to spot a phishing or malware site . Alex had to act fast
Alex had to act fast. He ripped the Ethernet cable from his computer to sever the attacker's connection and immediately alerted IT. The next three hours were a chaotic blur of re-imaging his machine and restoring files from backups, all while explaining to his boss why he had tried to install cracked software.
But the victory was short-lived. Thirty minutes later, as he was formatting the final graph, his screen froze. A ransom note appeared in a plain text file on his desktop, and his mouse cursor began moving on its own, clicking through his personal folders. The "crack" was a Trojan.