The Heritage Company, a telemarketing firm based in Sherwood and has two other branches with a total of 300 employees, has reported the suspension of their business 24th December. The note came from its CEO shocked public and their employees for not informing about a past ransomware hit that eventually took down the company.
The Big Hit
Sandra Franecke, CEO of the Heritage telemarketing company has revealed the helplessness status of her company through a Facebook post on 24th December. She revealed about the company being hit with a critical virus back in October, where the attacker demanded them to pay ransom for unlocking the encrypted data.
This led company to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for obtaining the decryption key and safeguarding the crucial data. All these instances were not informed to their employees nor public, as they thought they could cope up with the attack and relive normally soon. But the struggle tightened and hit company to go deep into loses, where, the CEO explained as,
“I have been doing my utmost best to keep our doors open, even going as far as paying your wages from my own money to keep us going until we could recoup what we lost due to the cyber attack”.
A Temporary Shut Down
At last, she announces the final viable choice they’ve opted for; closing the company, but temporarily. She said, “The ONLY option we had at this time was to close the doors completely or suspend our services until we can regroup and reorganize and get our systems running again.”
She said that their IT employee was working hard to bring back the systems on track, and will update the status on 2nd January 2020. So she suggested everyone call the office on that day to know about their jobs being back and the life of the company.
While employees were furious for not being informed until the last minute, they all were terminated abruptly on the grand Christmas eve! The current situation led all the employees to lose their job with most of them filing for unemployment at local offices.
