It was 6:45 a.m. on a sleepy Monday morning, October 23, 2019. Pennsylvania Scale's Production Scheduling and Control Manager was jarred to full alert by a message on her screen: "Warning: Your files have been locked. This is not a joke." It wasn't. In the wee hours of the previous Sunday, precisely 1:34 a.m., offshore hackers who routinely scan IP addresses looking for random vulnerabilities had discovered an opportunity through a remote access link and encrypted the files on the host server. To make matters worse, the offsite backup, which would provide insurance against possible data breaches, had failed. The reality became clear: This was going to be a huge problem. We assumed the worst, critical data used every day for our manufacturing plant was locked down by hackers via the Dark Web.
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