Several years ago, while working for an Avionics company as a Systems Administrator, I received a call from an end-user about a weird message he had on his screen with a countdown timer. I immediately stopped what I was doing and went to see what the message was. Sure enough, there was a message on his screen that said we had less than 72 hours to pay if we wanted to receive the encryption key for our files. The employee had visited a normally good website that had been compromised. I had a significant amount of data, several terabytes that had been encrypted because of the level of access this employee had. Once I neutralized the malware, I sent communication to the entire company telling everyone to not make file-level changes for any files on the network shares. I was using Backup Exec at the time so once I deleted the encrypted files, I restored all the data from a backup tape. Fortunately, we only lost part of a day's work, but it still took an entire day to recover our data.
Another not so scary, but funny story. At the time I was working for an Oil and Gas company and one of the VP’s was at one of our remote offices giving a presentation to the board members and some executives. She called me in a panic because nothing was being projected on the screen from her laptop. I walked through the steps over the phone making sure the projector was connected to the laptop correctly and the laptop was set to extend the display to the projector. The VP was frantic and told me several times that it should just work and she knows that everything is connected correctly. Calmly I said, “Did you take the lens cap off the projector?” The VP said, “Everything is working now, thanks!”
