Take the example of Maastricht University in December 2019. Then a hack with a nasty piece of software rendered the entire university network with most of the server structure and workstations unusable. What was the damage:
- FOX-IT was called in on weekends, Christmas, New Year's Eve etc. to investigate and share knowledge with the hack, its clean-up and how to recover.
- A very large proportion of the computers had to be reinstalled. These computers also had to be checked for traces of the virus in parts that you cannot easily see (bios or secret partitions on the hard disk/SSD drive).
- Almost all production servers and backups locally became unusable. Only reinstallation was going to help for the recovery.
- A ransom was paid to the hackers to decrypt the network structure/Active Directory (the Volkskrant speaks of tons of ransom).
- A large part of the servers had to be reinstalled and data from backups had to be restored where possible.
- In-house and external employees spent many days doing all the repairs... This also happened during the December holidays.
- The damage to image was enormous. As a company, something like this can also cost many customers or scare off investors.