Lockey Virus hits Quality Pool

Everyone knows the saying “it will never happen to me,” right? Most IT guys have that same attitude. Sure, most of us have seen common a computer virus or malware here and there. Your normal Trojan viruses while annoying are fairly easy to eradicate. However, on February 16th Quality Pool got hit with the Lockey Ransom Virus.

This “ransom ware” as it is called, even made the national news. You might have seen the story on Good Morning America about the hospital in California that got hit with it and it cost them $17,000! What the ransom ware does is it encrypts your common file types like Microsoft Office files, any pictures, pdf’s etc. They don’t steal them or delete them. They are literally held captive (encrypted) for ransom. After spending a day working with our IT vendor to figure it out we finally decided to just pay the ransom rather than rebuild everything from backups.

Our IT vendor happened to be at a user’s group when this happened and they were able to ask other users about it and discovered several companies that had gotten hit in the last couple of weeks and in the end, after spending days trying to recover their data decided to pay the ransom too. Fortunately for us, the ransom was reasonable, so we too opted to pay it. Once the thieves received our ransom money they did send the decryption tool and we recovered all of our data. As our President, Cary Engelhart said, “I guess there is some honor among thieves!”

This ransom ware typically comes through in an email attachment. Once opened it quickly encrypts most of your common data files. As we have learned the hard way—make sure you know who the email is from before you open it!! If you have any questions on ways to protect yourself, or if you have been hit with the Lockey virus and need some coaching to get through how to pay with BitCoin (that’s a whole other story) feel free to give me a call at Quality Pool Supply.

Glenn Sims (Director of Personnel)

Glenn Sims (click here to email)

810-670-2106 (direct dial office no.)