Luja Sawtech A/S has been a market leader in helping sawmills and planing mills get the most out of their band saws for over two decades. The company helps optimise production lines and offers several patent-pending technologies and solutions that increase capacity and strengthen the safety of employees, including the Luja Blade Guide System™ for precise control of the saw band. Søren Luja Hansen is the owner and founder of Luja Sawtech.
“For us, the past few months have been stressful beyond description,” says owner and founder Søren Luja Hansen from Luja Sawtech. His IT nightmare began on May 31, when the hosting company IT-Hotellet in Odense, Denmark, was hit by an extensive cyber-attack. “For weeks, we didn’t know if our company would survive, but now we can relax a little more as we are back in operation and have restored almost all data. This has been both an exhausting and educational process.”
Later, we will learn how Søren Luja Hansen experienced the process, and how he, as a customer of IT-Hotellet, had to make decisions from one hour to the next to save his company. First, let’s go back to the impact of this large-scale cyber-attack.
On Friday, May 31, the IT administrators at IT-Hotellet became aware that they were exposed and that outside forces were encrypting server data. It soon became clear that the company’s systems were under a serious ransomware attack, where customer data was encrypted and locked to be released against a ransom later. CEO of IT-Hotellet, Thomas Vandsted Nielsen, quickly decided to contact the Cyber Security company Dubex.
“We put an Incident Response Team on the case immediately and the team’s priority was to get an overview of the system, which is the usual procedure when the client is unknown to us.” says the CEO of Dubex, Gorm Mandsberg. “With an unknown system, it often feels like walking into a pitch-black room with a flashlight to try and get an overview of data, damage, and any backdoors that may have been installed. At that point, the system was still online.”
It quickly turned out that the attack could not be contained as the infection had spread to virtually all customers’ data. As CEO of IT-Hotellet, Thomas Vandsted Nielsen had to make the difficult decision of ‘pulling the plug’ to protect the customers’ data. This decision probably saved Søren Luja Hansen’s business.
“I cannot stress enough how crucially important our data is,” explains Søren Luja Hansen of Luja Sawtech. “In addition to general administration, we also had our accounting program, order system, and customer information stored at IT-Hotellet. Further, all the necessary technical documentation about solutions, technologies, and patents was stored on our servers, too. To top it all off, our peak season is July and August, where we earn a large part of the year’s turnover.”
Therefore, Søren Luja Hansen believes that it saved his company that IT-Hotellet pulled the plug and went offline. Because even if the systems were infected, there was no longer access to data from the outside, and Dubex could then start retrieving data for Luja Sawtech and the other companies that were affected.
However, the problems did not end there. After the first hectic hours and days, insurance companies were also involved in the case, which gave rise to more questions that needed clarification.
Although the process has been extremely stressful for the customers who were affected by the cyberattack on IT-Hotellet, it also served to expose the priorities and dilemmas that arise when decisions must be made under pressure. Gorm Mandsberg, CEO of Dubex, elaborates:
“We always move in as quickly as we can, form an overview and immediately try to contain the threats and save the data. That is the number one priority. Time is of the essence, and security holes and access must be identified and stopped. Afterwards, there will often be an aftermath with the distribution of responsibility and expenses, because our experts must be paid for the work of separating the various customers’ data as well as cleaning up, preparing, and handing over the data securely.”
Gorm Mandsberg is complemented by Søren Luja Hansen of Luja Sawtech, who concludes:
“Today we are happy with the quick intervention and to be back in business, but we could have done without the discussions with the insurance company when things got heated. I can only recommend having clear agreements on areas of responsibility and contingency plans when it comes to data storage and protection. If an attack occurs, time must not be spent debating who does what and who will pay. The focus must be solely on getting back on your feet and in operation again.”
In the video below you’ll hear the story from Søren Luja, CEO, Luja Sawtech.
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