Portable Sanitation Association International

ASSOCIATIONINSIGHT Portable Sanitation Association International News BIWEEKLY EDITION JULY 22, 2020 Page 3 It Can Happen to You…continued from page 1 Continued on page 15 Our IT consultant was able to retrieve data from some sources of our backups, but due to the sophisticated ransomware not all of our data was retrievable. Our operations system was restored through the end of April. This meant we needed to re-enter all customer orders, payments and relevant files and documentation that was lost. This took our team approximately 1 week to manually to update the system. Our team utilized the applicable hard copies of route sheets, order forms and other documents to help in the manual re-entry of data. The Challenge of the Financials Despite the backups we believed we had in place, our financials were only restored through November 2019. Rebuilding our financials has been a challenging task as this includes a fiscal-year end closing as well. Prior to the attack, we believed that we had three sources of backups for QuickBooks. These included: • tapes that were switched out daily on the server, • a monthly subscription with QuickBooks backing up our data, and • a USB thumb drive updated daily. Unfortunately, we discovered that all three of these backups were not being done or not being done properly. The directory and drive containing the financials were not included in the daily backups. When we retained our IT consultant and his company to handle our needs, he was misinformed on the drive location of the financials. As a result, the financials were not being saved properly as part of the daily backup that we had believed was occurring to the server. We reached out to QuickBooks for assistance to our backup only to find out that they too never had a backup for us for the past two years despite our monthly subscription fee for this particular service. After hours of calls to QuickBooks and speaking to multiple managers, they were only able to offer a refund of $150.00 for the money assessed on the service they failed to provide. Lastly, the USB backup was not removed from the computer to which it was assigned, and therefore it was also encrypted during the ransomware. Had it been removed and updated daily as part of our internal procedure that we again believed was occurring, we likely would be in a very different situation today. Luckily the data that we were able to restore from November 2019 came from the USB, so thankfully we at least had it to restore the vast majority of the business's financial record keeping. On May 9, 2020, approximately one week after the incident occurred, we received a call from the US Secret Service. They were made aware that we were the recipient of the ransomware attack. They came to our offices to interview employees to further investigate the situation. They have looked into our hard drives and have been working with our IT consultant. In the most recent conversations, they have mentioned that they believe the ransomware was generated from an email. No further updates have been provided on the case.

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