For months, three employees at the Timeless Interiors store in Bluffton painstakingly catalogued the store’s inventory as part of an upgrade to the store’s computer program.
It took just one errant computer click by an employee to activate a virus that was hidden in a nondescript email attachment. The virus wiped out nearly all of their progress.
“It was absolutely devastating,” said store owner Holly Dixon, adding that only about 20 percent of the data her staff manually entered into the program was able to be recovered once they were able to get back into their computer system. The employees spent three months re-entering the lost data that included pricing information and item descriptions.
Today, the Greater Bluffton Chamber of Commerce will offer a free seminar to local businesses and groups so they don’t end up in the same situation. The event will cover mitigating risks from viruses, handling suspicious emails and saving backup data. More seminars are planned at the Technical College of the Lowcountry’s New River campus and at Regus later in the month, according to a news release.
Even backup data can be corrupted if it is not handled properly. Ebenezer Pentecostal Church in Bluffton lost nearly 15 years of church records after a virus hit the church’s computer network, said Natalia Oros, the daughter of Pastor Patricia Rosales. The virus — a 256-bit encryption algorithm delivered through an email attachment — locked the church out of their computers and corrupted the church’s backup data, which was left connected to a computer at the church.
Like Timeless Interiors, the church had antivirus software, but it too was circumvented when the virus attacked the system. The viruses likely had a script that turned off the antivirus programs, leaving the computer networks completely vulnerable.
Dixon said her store is better prepared now for the threat of a virus, but the preparations pale to the ordeal the computer virus put them through.
“It was a horrific mess and it really turned us sideways for a few months,” she said. “It was a real scary thing.”
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