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Redstor rescues vets hit by ransomware attack

Terry Wilson, the practice manager at Teva Veterinary Clinic, revealed how staff turned up for work on a Monday morning to discover cybercriminals had encrypted all their files.

However, after a quick call to Redstor - a specialist in cloud backup, disaster recovery, archiving, search and data migration services - Wilson was told a backup copy of the clinic’s data would be available within 10 minutes.

He then set about wiping the central server and reloading computers with Microsoft Windows software, and thanks to InstantData - Redstor’s user-driven technology - the practice was up and running again within the hour as if nothing had happened.

With InstantData, there is no need to wait for a full recovery. At the click of a button, Redstor offers streamed, on-demand access to whatever data is needed, ending downtime.

Wilson said: “I’d warned staff that it would be chaos for 48 hours, but Redstor exceeded all my expectations. The internal office network was working again that morning. I thought it would be a lot trickier to get all the data.”

If the Redstor support technician had been sitting next to him, he insisted: “I would have kissed him! I honestly thought he was joking when he said how quickly he could get us sorted.”

Teva Vet became a Redstor customer three years ago following a previous ransomware attack that locked down the practice’s x-ray files. Wilson recalled: “They wanted $350 000 - a ridiculous amount - money we could not afford.

“The ransomware corrupted our Google Drive and in trying to find a solution to that, we learned that Redstor iterates, so that every day it backs up a version that is independent of the previous one. We’ve been using Redstor ever since.”

Wilson knows the value of having a data management solution that delivers reliable backup and recovery and disaster recovery, along with archiving, discovery and insight. He is also safe in the knowledge that Redstor’s InstantData will reduce the impact of any further security incidents.

Eliminating downtime

The cause of the most recent ransomware attack on Teva Veterinary Practice was a malicious email attachment. It was an executable file, sent under the guise of an invoice from a trusted supplier. When opened by the recipient, the ransomware downloaded, infecting the system.

Wilson said: “You can train staff as much as you like, but only go so far. If ransomware is hidden in an invoice, it is hard to expect staff under pressure to check executable files for hidden links. The likelihood is that we are going to be hit again, but we know we can now get up and running within an hour of being hit by a full attack where everything disappears.

“Another veterinary practice was hit the week before us and they lost everything. They did not have the same backup protocol that we have.”

Teva Veterinary Practice is one of more than 40 000 clients around the world that use Redstor to discover, analyse, control and protect their critical data.

Wilson said: “We looked online at a couple of solutions but nothing matched Redstor. When we go to professional development conferences we are always recommending Redstor. A big selling point is also that it connects and iterates, then disconnects. It’s not like a remote backup to Google Drive, or Google or Dropbox or any of those solutions.

“You can always go back to the previous day’s iteration or to whenever the data was not infected, rather than just have one massive backup and lose everything that’s come after the previous full backup. That is what a lot of solution providers came to us with. The way the whole process worked with Redstor saved us immensely.”

Redstor also allows Teva to budget confidently with a pricing model that is subscription-based, simple and predictable. Multiple copies of backups are held securely encrypted in local data centres, and the encryption key is set by the customer, ensuring no unauthorised access.

This is particularly important for a veterinary practice that has sensitive financial data and a legal requirement to have an offsite backup of all x-ray data for a minimum of five years.

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