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Was just another BAU day 
at Duesseldorf Uni
Lads in the IT room 
playing minesweeper and internet spades

A few emails here and there
RE: IT Support Needed
I can't access my files
Something's wrong with Citrix

George stroke his beard
Screw it, must be stupid SMB
We should've stuck with UNIX
"Something's going on", said Emery
Anxiously searching Elastic

Things are starting to look encrypted

Gasps shouted across the room
As they stared at the long ransom note
Off went the not-so-classic ring tones
on the IT admins' work phones

Nicht das.. Nein!
Swear words dropped on the white bricks
As Emery ran across emergency
Notepad.exe open with bitcoin addresses
mocking her steps pass every screen
PA's buzzing, an ambulance redirected

The white van blazes towards Wuppertal
It's whole thirty kilometers
As the CRT screen rang
A white line cut across the missed murder
From a siren that never went


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In remembrance to the woman that died on September 9 2020, the first person that died directly due to a ransomware attack. She had to be redirected to a hospital in Wuppertal 19 miles (30 km) away and died in the ambulance on the way.

The Siren that never went was the network intrusion detected too late.
The IT department described is mostly fictional.

Glossary

BAU - Business As Usual

minesweeper and internet spades - games built-in to Windows XP

Citrix - popular and dirty commercial remote access software. It's remote code execution vulnerability allowed hackers to get in thousands of systems

SMB - Server Message Block, the protocol used by Microsoft Windows networks to share files

UNIX - A simple and secure operating system standard, implemented by BSD, MacOS, Solaris and some Linux distributions

Elastic - ElasticSearch, a search engine often used in the ELK stack (Elastic,Logstash,Kibana) to search events and data across different network endpoints

"Nicht das.. Nein!" - German for "not this.. no!"

Notepad.exe - the program often used to display ransomware notes by cyber criminals

bitcoin - a cryptocurrency that's hard to trace, often used by criminals to demand ransomware payments
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