Arizona Beverages hit by a massive ransomware attack

• The beverage supplier Arizona Beverages suffered a ransomware attack which led to a shutdown of its sales operations for almost two weeks.
• The company’s back-end servers were running an outdated Windows operating systems, therefore, they were unable to restore its systems and retrieve the data for days.

What is the issue - Arizona Beverages was hit by a ransomware attack infecting almost 200 servers and computers that were connected to the network.

Why it matters - Arizona struggled for nearly five days to restore its systems and retrieve its data after the ransomware attack as its backup system wasn’t properly configured.

Later, the beverages company hired Cisco incident responders to help them in restoring their systems.

What happened - The company learned about the attack after a ransom note containing the company’s name and the message was displayed on the screens of more than 200 servers and computers on its network. “Your network was hacked and encrypted”, the ransom note message read, TechCrunch reported.

The company’s back-end servers were running an outdated Windows operating systems, therefore, they were unable to restore its systems and retrieve the data for days.

The company is currently recovering from the ransomware attack after it hired incident responders from Cisco. However, the company has spent hundreds of thousands on new hardware, software, and recovery costs. “Once the backups didn’t work, they started throwing money at the problem,” a spokesperson for Cisco said.

Worth noting - Attackers used iEncrypt ransomware to infect the network of Arizona Beverages. The ransomware was identified as iEncrypt after the ransom note stated that ‘there’s no known decryption tool for iEncrypt’.