American IT Tycoon SHI International Website Crashed by Malware Attack

The July 4 holiday saw a malware attack on SHI International's network, a New Jersey-based supplier of information technology (IT) goods and services.

The event, which the business described as "a coronated and professional malware attack," in its official statement occurred over the US holiday weekend and led to the company shutting down a significant portion of its online presence (including email and websites) while security and IT personnel investigated the problem.

The email access and public website of SHI had been brought back, according to the announcement, because of the “quick reactions of the security and IT teams at SHI”. And at the time of writing, the company’s website is running again.

The company added that "there is no evidence to suggest that customer data was exfiltrated during the attack" and the SHI supply chain's third-party systems were unaffected. SHI also communicated with federal bodies such as the FBI and CISA regarding the incident.

With $12.3 billion in projected revenue for 2021 and 5,000 workers worldwide working out of operational hubs in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, SHI positions itself as one of North America's biggest providers of IT solutions serving more than 15,000 corporations, public sectors, and academic customer groups globally.

The cyberattack is embarrassing for a major provider of IT services like SHI. One should have expected the accidents, prepared defenses against such an attack, and a disaster recovery plan that could be implemented immediately.

As it stands, SHI didn’t even seem to have a solid communication strategy as their social media voice box sent out a "Happy Independence Day" tweet just as customers began to panic and complained that both email and phone lines were unavailable. It wasn't until July 6 that the business posted an update.

We could see how dispensable a complete disaster recovery plan is for a business, especially for an internet-connected company, which, contains almost all walks of life in the digital world.

The company must have a data protection plan in case of such catastrophes as data breaches and natural disasters.

To establish a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, companies often take several factors into account.

Recovery Point Objectives (RPO): an indicator of the maximum amount of data that can be lost after recovering from a disaster, failure, or equivalent event before data loss becomes unacceptable to a company, measured in terms of time. This is managed by adjusting the frequency of data backups.

Recovery Time Objectives (RTO): the longest period of time that a computer, network, application, or system can be unavailable following a malfunction or emergency.

Offsite Data Backups: it is a recovery resource and a core part of the disaster recovery plan.

Chart of Accountability: who is in charge of putting a disaster recovery strategy into action? An accountability chart with defined roles and tasks makes it simpler to swiftly and consistently implement a strategy.

DR Plan Testing:constantly testing the current DR plan to ensure the RTOs and RPOs meet the norms in an actual situation and also detect problems neglected when enacting it.

One may be intimidated by the complexity of a DR plan construction, luckily, there are plenty of third-party professionals to help the company plan ahead for a rainy day. Vinchin Backup & Recovery is one of those outstanding data solutions for virtualizations such as VMware, XenServer, oVirt, etc.

Smart backup strategies for a shorter RPO: to save sufficient backup copies for emergencies, 3-2-1 backup rules are always worthy of reference. Vinchin Backup & Recovery keeps frequent backups through multiple transmission modes (LAN, SAN, etc.) available under custom schedules and job mail alerts. To perform efficient backup swiftly, you can enable CBT and data reduction techniques during the process. You can configure incremental backups on daily basis to keep frequent backups as the recovery resources. By doing so, the RTO is brought under control.

Besides that, the software has an offsite backup copy for you to build an offsite DR center in another location. They can be used to restore VM back to local or offsite production systems suppose the primary backup data are unavailable.

Flexible recovery options for minimum RTO: full VM recovery and instant recovery are listed in Vinchin Backup & Recovery for different situations. The instant recovery shortens RTO to seconds by recovering the VM directly from the backup repository.

Although catastrophes may not always be avoidable, having a recovery plan helps minimize possible damage and swiftly restore operations when one occurs. Disaster recovery plans and the preventative actions they incorporate are vital for curbing unexpected strikes.