People or small offices sometimes have to rebuild a PC or an important server. They are not talking about the reason behind, they are just taking the most reasonably, critical and extreme decision: rebuilding the systems as only possible and effective solution.

If this is a nightmare for some organizations, just imagine the world’s largest container shipping company: Maersk

“ It was the 27 of June when I was woken up at 4 o’clock in the morning. A call came from the office that we had suffered a cyberattack: We had to reinstall an entire infrastructure; we were a collateral damage of probably a state attack” -Jim Hagemann Snabe, Chairman of A.P. Møller-Maersk

Here are some of the facts, as the CEO stated:

Maersk reinstalled 45 000 PCs, 4 000 Servers and 2 500 applications to recover from NotPetya attack in 10 days

and to recover from NotPetya attack in 10 days Maersk covered 80% of all shipping volume without any IT

any IT NotPetya financial damage: between $250 and $300 million

The previous story is interesting from all possible angles: the IT responsiveness to such events, the corporate reaction and direction, the fact that no business is secure, private PCs or large multinationals can be easily affected for the same thread and the IT should be enabler for the reaction capacity.

Exactly as companies do, people and small business must be prepared for events of this magnitudes. We are living in days where attacks of this kind are seen as normal. Every day something different happen, breach here a breach there.It is the everyday course of action.

We have to be realistic and expect that this attacks hit our lives, either with the PC at home or with the PC we use in our office an be prepared. We have to think about our responsibility as Users and our actions in the cyberspace.

Maersk was able to react and win the battle, but what if not? Financially: it would have been an economic disaster for the shipping industry and for the country. For people: How many people would have lost their work? Just to mention some.

This was a huge and a monumental effort from Maersk’s IT staff. This is equivalent to installing a totally new infrastructure from the ground up. -Cimpanu (@bleepingcomputer.com) 25.01.2018

The button line of this is: be prepared because the only question is ”When”. It will just happen…probably is happening right now, just IT have not discovered it [yet].

No matter the size or purpose of the organization or government, it will happen.