Ring! Ring!
Me: I.T. Department, this is Daniel
Caller: Hey, Dan! It’s Ryan calling. I’m in a jam and wonder if you can help me out.
Me: I will do my best, Ryan. What’s up?
Ryan: I got hit with a virus. It encrypted all of my files and it wants to pay with BitCoin to get it back. Can you recover my data?
Me: Well … maybe. Maybe not. It will depend upon which virus you got hit with. You are not one of my managed services clients, so … Which anti virus were you using?
Ryan: I don’t know. It has a one of those black and white Asian bears as a logo? I was using their free version. I guess I installed it a couple of years ago.
Me: OK. I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a couple of other presumptions. This happened to your work laptop, right? And you’ve been using it for personal stuff? And now you have lost all your personal data? Probably a big document you were working on is gone and you need it back by morning?
Ryan: Uuhm. Yeah. That’s about it. I guess you see this a lot, then.
Me: Yeah, I do see employees abusing company equipment in this way. Why would you remove the company version of the anti-virus?
Ryan: because it would not let me go to the websites I want to go to get the new levels for my games.
Me: And you are playing games on your work laptop, because …?
Ryan: (Sigh) My home PC won’t connect to my new 46” TV in the living room.
Me: You know Tom is going to have an all out FIT when I invoice him for this, right?
Ryan: Oh, man! Come on, dude! Do me a solid, here! Tom will fire me for this!
Me: Yeah, he will, especially after how just last week he told me the cloud backup solution I recommended was ‘too expensive’.
Ryan: So? How do we fix this, both of us keep our jobs AND convince Tom to buy your backup service?
Me: We start by my meeting you in the office, first thing in the morning. I will need to check to see if the auto backup tool I set on the server has at least been getting your work files.
Ryan: Can’t you just give me one of these bitcoins so we can buy the fix?
Me: Last I looked a full bitcoin was close to $7,000.00. I am NOT going to just GIVE you a bitcoin.
Ryan: I’m so screwed! Man, please! I’ve got a FAMILY to support.
Me: There is nothing I can do to help you, tonight. I will be at your office at 7m tomorrow morning. Maybe we can get this fixed BEFORE Tom comes in.