Happy spoopy season. For the month of October, we are highlighting some scary stories in IT Networks and Cybersecurity from across the web. This one comes to us from Reddit.

Legend goes that this firm had a very particular customer management software, and to go with it workstations were individually administrated. Each workstation was given a license to common retail products, like Adobe suite and Microsoft office, but no one kept track of the license codes…and there were 100 workstations.💀 When the company was hit with a ransom attack, they had to go through an individually reformat each machine.

Read the full story on this thread.

We get it. Sometimes you have to bend over backward to make sure that the tools you need to run your business interface with your network. But daily functions should never come at the expense of the security of your data and your clients. Making sure you work with your MSP to come up with solutions for legacy applications, but remain open to new technology and solutions will ensure that, should the unexpected occur, you are prepared and protected. Always have a BDR— a backup and disaster recovery plan!

According to Varonis, 56% of people do not know what steps to take if they are impacted by a malicious activity. This feels shockingly high when you consider the average data breach costs about $4.45M. (Source: IMB) So while the upfront cost of a custom network setup and security solution might be daunting, it’s much less scary in the face of unfortunate events.

‍