The serene, peaceful setting of the Acme resort, nestled on the Gulf Of Mexico on Florida’s west coast got a LOT more peaceful recently. No phones, no computer systems, no website, no email, no digital noise whatsoever. Sounds heavenly, right?
It sounds like heaven UNLESS you’re the owner of the resort. No reservations coming in, no inbound phone calls inquiring about bookings, no way to process credit card payments, no phone service for your guests, no access to your files. To a business owner, this is a nightmare.
The ASSI team got the call from these restless resort owners over the weekend and sprang into action. Darting over to the coast, armed with a team of IT professionals in the wee hours of the morning, we went to work. Once on the scene, we assessed the situation and quickly laid out a plan to restore this business back to digital bliss.
Once we started poking around we quickly discovered that this digital void was no accident. Routers did not fail, circuits were not blown, hard drives were still humming, this outage my friends, was the result of an insidious, angry deed. We asked the resort owners if they’ve had any recently disgruntled IT team members and it turns out, they most certainly did.
Enter Dastardly Darryl. Darryl wasn’t happy with the resort for a multitude of reasons and Darryl knew that he had full reign of the sleepy resort’s digital lifeblood. Armed with passwords and infrastructure knowledge, Darryl went to work to dismantle the very foundation of this paradise for weary vacationers. He accessed their registrar account, rerouted all of their DNS, and brought it all down in one fell swoop.
Not to worry, thanks to our team, digital paradise has been fully restored, but this could have all been prevented, very easily. Here’s how… As mentioned, Darryl had the keys to the kingdom. He should never have had those keys. He had complete control over the very top level that runs this fine organization. He had the email creds to the DNS registrar. When the resort owners attempted to regain control of the registrar, they were prevented from doing so because the creds had already been altered by Dastardly Darryl. After 3 days, their registrar finally granted them access and we were able to restore all critical services and infrastructure to keep their oasis up and running, and generating income.
Here’s the best advice we can leave you with. 1.) When setting up your IT infrastructure work with a reputable team, not a Dastardly Darryl. 2.) Setup your DNS with an alternative email address, for example, acmeresort@gmail.com rather than at your actual domain. 3.) Add your IT team if you need to, as a secondary on your accounts, NOT the admins. 4.) Build a plan of how to quickly get your services up and running.
As always, we’re here to help and we hate to see good people, trying to earn a living, getting taken for a ride by a rogue IT person with a score to settle. We can help insulate your resort, small business, or municipality from Dastaradly Darryls, give us a call today: (407) 414-6626. Now, please excuse us, we’re off to go sip on a daiquiri by the beach.
