Robert Anderson is the CIO for ZonaVerde, a medium-sized lawn maintenance company that services most of western Pennsylvania. ZonaVerde has built up its business over a 25-year period and now has over 8,000 steady clients. In recent years, it has managed to sign up about half its clients for sidewalk and driveway snow removal, thus, expanding its operations into the winter months. So, with the summer and winter business combined, ZonaVerde has been very successful in offering highly reliable services and very competitive prices. In fact, ZonaVerde has been so successful that it has driven most if its competitors out of business.
Just two days ago, Robert Anderson discovered that the company’s entire accounting system appears to be somehow corrupted. It will not accept his or anyone else’s password, and so it’s impossible to even log in and view customer accounts or send out monthly statements. Things are so bad that he is not even able to access the list of customers.
Robert had always been good at keeping backups, so he immediately tried to restore everything to a previous version of the software and database, but he discovered, to his horror, that all the backups were completely empty. This left operations in total chaos. All the customer contracts were lost, and he had no idea of which customers even owed ZonaVerde balances on their accounts.
Just as he was prepared to give the bad news to the CEO, Marty Perez, he received an e-mail from an individual claiming that it had encrypted ZonaVerde’s accounting system and that it would provide the unlock keys for a one-time Bitcoin payment of $50,000.
How should Robert Anderson respond? How might you investigate this case? Please use at least 350 words and five sources to answer the question. The sources should include title, author, date and link.
