Outsourcing IT Services to focus on core business

Wilkri-Etiketten G. Hoss KG is a medium-sized company that produces a wide range of labels for products from various industries, from personalised and multilayered designs to sealing labels and label rolls and many more. The 75 employees at the company’s site in Reutlingen, Germany, use a customised IT infrastructure as well as Smart Managed Services from Konica Minolta. Even a sudden Trojan malware attack did not cause any outages at the company, and the issue was fixed within a few hours. Although the direct point of contact on the customer side was not available at the time of the attack, the seamless mechanisms of Smart Managed Services from Konica Minolta ensured that the attack could be repelled immediately.

Trojan malware attack increases ticket volume

Shortly after 2 pm on a normal working day in September 2019, experts from Smart Managed Services at Konica Minolta noticed a large ticket volume at label manufacturer Wilkri, based in Reutlingen. At 2:44 pm, the team received the message «Services not running». Three minutes later, tickets began to be processed at the first level, which includes checking the services and summarising the tickets. At 3:28 pm, the incident was confirmed to be a Trojan malware attack.

Although the virus protection software in use at Wilkri had already intervened, it could not undertake a complete clean-up of the IT system. The Trojan malware continued to attempt to download malicious files. But Konica Minolta experts had now identified the malware more specifically, allowing it to be removed from the system manually.

“Although I was in a customer meeting at the time of the attack and therefore not reachable, Konica Minolta managed to completely resolve the attack on the same day it happened so that no damage was caused to our system” says Stefan Nedele, Sales Manager at Wilkri and direct point of contact for Konica Minolta at the company. “When I returned to our headquarters the next day, everything was running as usual. If I hadn’t been informed about the incident in the meantime, I wouldn’t have noticed anything had happened.”

At 7:44 pm, the entire infrastructure – comprising 17 virtual servers, three Hyper-V hosts and around 30 PC workstations – was successfully cleaned up and completely under control. As part of this process, the relevant files had to be manually deleted from affected environments. Konica Minolta completed this task using remote maintenance. The Trojan malware infected a third of the PCs and various servers in a very short space of time.

“Trojan malware attacks are not uncommon and usually affect larger companies – although small- and medium-sized companies are not immune to them. Anti-virus software alone is not enough to prevent attacks or find and close all security gaps – comprehensive monitoring is actually required to detect suspicious network behaviour,” says Rosaline Braun, Account Manager IT-Infrastructure at Konica Minolta and main point of contact for Wilkri.

Rapid intervention prevents outages

As the Trojan malware was identified and dealt with very quickly, there were no disruptions to daily business. Cleaning up the system so rapidly meant that data theft and days of downtime for the entire company could be avoided – these have often been the results of other Trojan malware attacks at companies and organisations that took longer to detect the problem. Such attacks often require backups and time-consuming system reinstallations.

“In order to avoid such outages and focus on our core business rather than IT, we decided several years ago to outsource the control and support for our IT landscape to Konica Minolta,” says Nedele, who particularly appreciates the reliability of Konica Minolta: “We consider Konica Minolta to be our partner that always resolves issues quickly and does not leave us out in the cold as a customer.”

Smart Managed Services provide IT support

Smart Managed Services monitor the Wilkri IT landscape 24/7 and provide real-time alerts and quick error detection – a system that has been proven to be valuable during this Trojan malware attack. Proactive monitoring and preventive IT maintenance ensure that this service is effective, and performance data can also be used to find and eliminate bottlenecks. Customers pick the dedicated services to suit their requirements and only pay for what they actually use.

Smart Managed Services is tailored to the needs and requirements of the customer. This also includes notification rules, including the ability to define representatives, as is the case at Wilkri.

If a problem occurs, measures can be taken quickly to eliminate faults and prevent system outages that could affect the entire process chain. One cause of this can be, as Wilkri discovered, an employee accidentally downloading the wrong file.