Imagine what it’s costs LD to close for even a couple hours, let alone days, while paying pharmacists, then imagine what scale of threat it would take to force any corporation to take that step. My guess, it would take an attack on multiple levels of systems… POS or inventory alone wouldn’t do it, data breach alone wouldn’t do it.

I work for a major/international Canadian resource corp… we had all IT suddenly shut down for several days a couple weeks ago because of a sudden and intense surge in targeted hacking activity, across several attack vectors including both traditional network/data hacking and some very convincing and well-researched phishing attempts targeted across the company in different countries, including some subsidiaries that aren’t obviously connected to the parent corp. An IT shutdown for an international corp of this size is shocking and unheard of in my industry … it literally takes a death to stop production of one operation for one day, this was every operation crippled or shut down for a number days. It was definitely a crisis reaction from the corp and a situation where they didn’t know how fucked they were or that anything was safe. IT services had already starting going down when we got notice, late on a Friday afternoon… there had already been some penetrations, and seems like the attackers’ plan was to do a mass phish on Friday, then use the phished info over the weekend to deepen their penetration. I would guess the LD attack was planned for the weekend as well.

These types of large-scale, organized attacks are becoming more and more common. I hope there will be some public information forthcoming on the LD attack, including the suspected perpetrators (North Korea and Russia are both safe bets)… but for some reason the details on these incidents seem to only come out via investigative reporting.