Cyber Security Article Writing

CASE STUDY: AvantPharm is a midsized, US-based pharmaceutical company with 350 employees and an annual revenue of over 200 million dollars. Just 12 years ago, the company was an aggressive startup with only 30 employees and an annual revenue of around 2 million dollars. Mark Brown, founder and CEO, guided the company to exponential growth during the last decade and was viewed by many as a visionary leader with unlimited potential. Most of the employees agreed that AvantPharm was a great place to work. The company paid well, treated employees with respect, and had high standards for quality assurance and customer service. Over the last several years, however, rumors began to spread among various departments that Mark’s philosophy of running financially “lean” with regard to staffing and critical project initiatives was a threat to the stability of the organization. The manager of IT, Jane Smith, was one of the first people to voice her concerns. In each of the last 4 years, Jane’s IT budget was reduced in order to redirect additional funding to Research & Development. As a result of these cuts, the IT department had not increased headcount in the last 2 years, nor was there any money to fund IT projects like hardware refreshes, cybersecurity improvements, and expansion of monitoring capabilities. Jane’s staff was also overwhelmed at times and feeling like the lack of support from organizational leadership was going to result in a critical oversight that would lead to significant downtime or, worse, a catastrophic cybersecurity incident. On more than one occasion, IT staff highlighted specific concerns about a general lack of adequate security controls and policies. Then, just 3 months ago, the worst-case scenario was fully realized. All it took was a single, well-crafted phishing email with an embedded URL that redirected the unsuspecting recipient to the attacker’s website. Once that happened, a malicious executable was automatically installed on the user’s computer and quickly crawled the entire network, encrypting data. By the time the systems administrators discovered the nature of the attack, it was largely too late. Critical files all across the AvantPharm network had been encrypted and were unusable. To make things worse, the backup system in place was unmonitored and had been failing backup jobs for months, so they did not have a reliable way to restore the encrypted data. AvantPharm narrowly averted complete disaster by paying the attackers one of the largest ransomware payments in history; 25 million dollars. However, they nearly lost the business when the attacker took 2 full weeks to return control of their data as well, so the impact was further damaging to profitability and reputation. In the end, the company barely weathered the attack and resumed operations at reduced capacity over the last month. Mark Brown stepped down as CEO and quickly named General Legal Counsel Brad Miller the Interim CEO. Brad has been tasked with fixing mistakes of the past while the organization looks for a permanent leader.