ProImage NewsWayX Cloud workflow enables the Kingsport Times-News to Publish after local virus attack.
On Saturday ProImage received an urgent phone call from The Kingsport Times-News, owned by Six Rivers Media, LLC was the first newspaper to serve Kingsport. Printed weekly as the “Progress,” at first in Johnson City. It later started semi-weekly editions and thrived with the prospering city. Daily publication began in 1924.
The Incident:
Dan Strickler – System Manager received a cell phone call from one of their morning weekend employees stating that the phone system was not operable. Dan states “After checking the phone systems power and finding everything normal, I noticed that we were unable to access our virtual systems that run our data center. It is believed that an internal user opened a malicious hyperlink. It appears that the malicious program ran early morning on Saturday October 28, 2023.”
The Faust ransomware, a Phobos ransomware family variant, had encrypted our entire Virtual SAN infrastructure. The encryption caused us to have to rebuild the system. After restoring the infrastructure, we started the long problematic recovery process.
The ransomware also encrypted our in-house ProImage NewsWayX workflow system servers, so we had no way to output pages internally. Chris Jones, our prepress supervisor, reached out to ProImage at 7:30 PM to see what they could possibly do to help us through this situation.
The Solution:
Tony, at ProImage support, reached back out to Chris within minutes of his initial support call. Chris says “Tony was able to work with us and setup a cloud instance for us to use to process the pages via FTP. This process worked well, and within two and a half hours ProImage cloud workflow was operational, and we had no problems getting the pages processed and output through our CTP systems. We were able to produce pages and deliver a printed product to our customers on Monday morning. All five of our publications had to be moved to the cloud. We have two daily newspapers and three weeklies that publish every Wednesday.”
“We had several folks from different Companies help during the recovery process, but we felt ProImage was the best support team we worked with, and we are grateful for the help they provided” stated Dan Strickler. “We were also surprised to find out that ProImage has over 60 customers using NewsWayX in a Cloud workflow environment” mentioned Tim Archer – VP of Operations.
Cloud Benefits and Decision:
The Kingsport Times-News has since decided to move to ProImage’s AWS based redundant NewsWayX Cloud workflow permanently. The ProImage hosted solution provides The Kingsport News-Times Publications a custom workflow on our Cloud servers with no single point of failure. Their users have logons just as if the servers were local to softproof, approve, and track pages & plates. Plate ready Tiffs are automatically sent to their local CTP devices for output. ProImage maintains the Servers, RIPs and Software so versions are always current and protects against future virus threats.
