Be Very Careful What You Bring into Your Business

It’s the time of year when we traditionally use scary stories and other cautionary tales to teach valuable life skills and lessons. We wanted to jump in on the fun and games by recontextualizing one of the master of the macabre’s works so that this lesson applies to your business technology. With that, we give you our version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.

CrimsinCarnage had been infecting businesses left and right. Few could remember a cyberattack so brutal or so effective. A blood-red screen was the first sign a system had been infected. A computer would freeze up, transmit all its data to some unknown server, then literally burn itself out by overworking the hardware. If anyone saw that red screen, they had better hope they weren’t attached to a network, because the whole process took only moments.

The finance company Prosper.O continued operations unimpeded, even as its peers and vendors failed around it. The CEO, Steven Princeton, had insisted upon effectively running the entire business exclusively via an intranet and paper records. Prosper.O collected dozens of clients who had left the other businesses for its perceived safety under Princeton’s mandates. All personal devices were checked in and out at the door, and all communications were relayed via analog means. The company and everyone who worked there was safe from CrimsinCarnage.

Five or six weeks into the CrimsinCarnage outbreak, dozens of businesses had closed their doors for good, and Prosper.O had become the preferred vendor for many of the businesses who hadn’t.

Their client list became truly impressive, only outshone by the unique design Princeton had insisted on for the workspace itself. Different teams worked in rooms painted in different colors, twists and turns turning one large space into a series of winding departments. Even the large windows in each room were ever so slightly tinted in the room’s color, altering the natural light they let in. The customer service representatives worked in the blue room, while marketing worked in the purple room. Next came the green office of the human resources team. Fourth was orange and housed the legal department; fifth came the white walls of the internal finance team, and the sixth room was violet and set aside for sales. The seventh area was reserved for business leadership, and was decorated with professional dark greys and blacks. This was also the only room where the windows didn’t faintly match the decor; here, the windows were tinted scarlet. These windows were—according to Princeton—meant to inspire different emotions he saw as beneficial for different departments to feel.

Also in the administrative offices was an oddity in such a tech-heavy space: a large grandfather clock—lacquered a deep black, of course—with a loud, swinging pendulum and a loud, deep, discordant chime that alerted the entire office to the passing of each hour. This chime was such that everyone, regardless of what they were doing, paused for a brief moment in shared discomfort. Of course, nobody could agree on who had put the clock there in the first place, so removing it was never brought up.

Despite the strange sounds that came from the clock, the office was a happy one, with Princeton loudly encouraging a “work hard, play harder” approach at every opportunity.

The workplace was busy, employees bustling from room to room to work together as needed, a constant buzz of collaboration ringing in the air. Indeed, it was only when the clock chimed that the team fell silent.

Amongst these employees was a relative stranger, unknown to most in the company and still learning how things were done; particularly concerning Prosper.O’s strict security policies. The team knew this person had joined (a welcome email had been distributed, as was customary when anyone joined the company’s staff), but few had actually met and introduced themselves.

The new employee reached the violet room and sat, settling in for the workday. Out came the water bottle. Out came the ID badge. Out came the small USB drive found outside, missed when all other devices were safely locked away.

This USB drive was as nondescript as you can imagine. Unbranded and unmarked, save for its 32GB capacity emblazoned on the casing, the new employee had stumbled across it on the streets and pocketed it. Perhaps the saved files held clues as to who owned it; if not, a 32GB drive was sure to come in handy.

Princeton was roaming the departments, making small talk with his employees—cracking jokes, getting updates about his team members’ families, and otherwise hobnobbing. When he reached the sales department, however, his eyes widened.

“Wait, we don’t use drives here, everything’s on the network… no, stop!”

Desperation seized Mr. Steven Princeton’s voice as he watched his newest hire insert the USB drive into the hub resting on the desk. Diving forward, the CEO of Prosper.O was too late.

Beginning at the computer in front of the hapless new hire, every computer connected to the building’s intranet swiftly froze and, moments later, shone bright crimson from its display. This was how CrimsinCarnage was spread: by relying on ignorant or overconfident users to walk through the door with it. Before long, all the displays were black, vacant in death as the hardware was ruined.

Even the impenetrable defenses of Prosper.O had been penetrated, and as the malware spread throughout the network, darkness and data loss and CrimsinCarnage held dominion over the entirety of the business.

***

Hopefully, the lesson is clear: never, ever trust found hardware unless and until an information technology professional—like those at USA Computer Services—has thoroughly evaluated and approved it. If you’re interested in getting help with your IT (and avoiding issues like the one Prosper.O fell victim to), reach out to us at (704) 665-1619.