Unfortunate trends continue for the Canadian construction industry as another company has been victimized by a cyber attack. Calgary’s Professional Excavators and Construction was left facing a six-figure recovery bill after a ransomware attack locked them out of their IT systems.
The organization first noticed printers acting up and thought nothing of it. Things seemed to escalate quickly as they found themselves “completely locked out of every part of (their) computer system,” according to Jan Gryckiewicz, the company’s president.
Without access to their server the company was facing severe downtime and the inability to submit their bid for “one of the biggest pursuits in (their) company’s history.”
The lost opportunity was seen as a major disappointment, however, the costs of getting their systems back up and running has been damaging. While it’s taken less than two weeks to get 90% of their systems back up and running, it’s estimated that remediation costs will reach over $100,000. Gryckiewicz says,“to recoup that money, we probably have to do $1 million of additional work this year just to be able to cover off $100,000 in additional cost.”
The company has stated that they have not paid a ransom and will not be bearing further costs of an investigation of the incident.