Looking back June has been a crazy month. I hope you have been able to take time out to spend more time with family and friends during these summer months. We wrapped the PineappleMan Triathlon which you will read about in this months newsletter. We sent part of our team to Automation Nation a technical conference.
NotPetya was a concern for us this month, we read up on the reports and reviewed how it was spread. I thought you’d like to hear how we approached this as a team.
We use a variety of techniques to detect viral activity and multiple layers of defense to protect our clients. Most of the layers such as Sonicwall Firewalls and our AV Engines already had the signature to block NotPetya.
We were still concerned that even a single machine that got infected could cause real problems. It was reported that it used more advanced techniques to spread, that it infected boot sectors and used random file name extensions in its encryption.
One of our team, Mike Keppler found a vaccine that had been published. He and another Senior System Engineer, John Stimpson wrote and tested a script that would inoculate our systems against the threat. Brent Mattingly, a Senior System Engineer provided a second set of eyes – we have a process called 2 person integrity when making important changes.
The team asked me for permission to do a small test deployment. This went well, a few hours later we deployed to the hundreds for servers that we manage, a few hours after that we deployed to all of our clients workstations and laptops.
So hours after the initial reports, we had confirmed protection and deployed an inoculation to prevent anything that might slip through. All in a days work here at IRN – but I am proud of our team.
I want to introduce John Stimson to you. “Stimpy”, as we affectionately call him, comes to us with years of experience. A veteran of the US Navy, he also worked for companies like Tupperware and Authentic and most recently 5 years at Apple managing petabytes of enterprise storage.
John wrote a great article this month – we are proud to have him on the React Team and thrilled that he has joined the IRN family.
Enjoy your Summer!
Eric
