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posted by janrinok on Tuesday October 01 2019, @07:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the $95-million-would-pay-for-a-LOT-of-backups dept.

Ransomware Incident to Cost Danish Company a Whopping $95 Million:

After a month, hearing aid manufacturer Demant has yet to recover after the attack.

Demant, one of the world's largest manufacturers of hearing aids, expects to incur losses of up to $95 million following what appears to be a ransomware infection that hit the company at the start of the month.

[...] Demant's troubles began at the start of the month, on September 3, when in a short statement on its website, the company said it was shutting down its entire internal IT infrastructure following what it initially described as "a critical incident."

What really happened on the company's network, we'll never know, as Demant never revealed anything except that its "IT infrastructure was hit by cyber-crime."

Reports in Danish media[1, 2] pegged the incident as a ransomware attack, and it sure did look like one from the outside.

Per its own statements, all the company's infrastructure was impacted -- and impacted severely.

This included the company's ERP system, production and distribution facilities in Poland, production and service sites in Mexico, cochlear implants production sites in France, amplifier production site in Denmark, and its entire Asia-Pacific network.

Companies usually recover after data breaches within days; however, Demant took weeks, is still recovering assets today, and expects to take two more weeks to recover in full. This pattern of destruction that takes months to recover from is usually encountered during ransomware infections only.

[...] These business upheavals have been a disaster for the company's bottom line. In a message to its investors, Demant said it expects to lose somewhere between $80 million and $95 million.

The sum would have been higher, but the company expects to cash in a $14.6 million cyber insurance policy.

Most of the losses have come from lost sales and the company not being able to fulfill orders. The actual cost of recovering and rebuilding its IT infrastructure were only around $7.3 million, a small sum compared to the grand total.

How many Soylentils have discovered a security vulnerability in your own company's code and succeeded in persuading management to provide sufficient time and resources to address them?


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday October 02 2019, @08:02PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 02 2019, @08:02PM (#902006) Journal

    Magtape is good if you've got a large enough system to justify the cost. Most don't. Magtape also isn't very good for random writes or retrievals, so it depends on your use-case. As a backup system it's fine, if you can justify the cost. For off-line storage it's rather poor.

    What we're concentrating on here is backups, but USB disks are also good for the kind of thing that would have required a tape library in the old days. (Stuff too big to justify having it take up active fast disk space.)

    N.B.: USB disks aren't quite as fast as USB sticks, so you don't use them in quite the same way. But they're also better at "permanent retention". Not as good as CDs were (I don't know about DVDs or Blu-Rays). And if you ever had those glass CDs where they were written by a laser burning a pit in a metal film...those are good pretty much indefinitely if you store them in a clean, dry, place away from things that might scratch or break them. But writing them was quite expensive (IIRC a writer was approx. $30,000, and there's been inflation since then), and they didn't hold all that much per each.

    Everything is a bunch of trade-offs, and what the proper trade-off is varies not only with your use-case, but also with the technology. But I currently know of NO case where 200 BPI even parity tape would be the best choice.

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