Customer Success Story: Michael T. Gibson, P.A.

My name is Michael T. Gibson. I’m the president and CEO of Michael T. Gibson PA. We’re a personal injury firm specializing in auto accident cases. Been in business here fifteen years, handle pretty decent volume. When people come here, they’re dealing with a lot of medical treatment, doctor visits, etcetera, etcetera. So having that information is critical to us and keeping it as secure as possible is critical for protecting our clients.

Getting out of bed one morning and my partner Todd gives me a call and says, hey, you know, there’s these ransom letters printing out of the printers. And, you know, within a few minutes, was able to understand, like, we’d been hit with a ransomware attack, who the attackers were, and what it was gonna do to us, which was basically cripple us for the time being.

So my reaction at first was to call our IT professionals to see if they were gonna provide any specialists to get us out of this, you know, cybersecurity, lawyers, what have you. We ended day one with the IT professional. You know, their insurance company was gonna take care of us and provide all these folks to resolve this. Day two came. Ten in the morning, I made the phone call right away.

When there was nothing being provided, that’s when I decided to take matters in my own hands and look around for the best people that I could find.

I came across either GuidePoint’s own website or articles in other websites where their professionals were quoted. We got on a call. There were about twenty professionals on the call. And, you know, for the first time in thirty something hours I’ve been dealing with this, I felt like, okay. We have a team and a plan to attack this and to win the day.

They put me at ease in that, you know, I wasn’t the first person to go through this, and we had negotiated a resolution of the event with our attackers by, somewhere around noon on that Friday. So you’re looking at within a forty eight hour time frame.

As the day progressed Friday and we resolved the underlying attack, it moved to: here’s what’s involved in restoration, decryption, and how to get our network functional again. You do run into these, you know, whether you wanna call them technical or logistical challenges in getting the information back up and running. And, without the GuidePoint professionals doing what they did, I don’t know that we would have gotten by that step. And to be honest with you, I think that was the most important part of the whole process.

I think education is a big part of going through one of these. You know, as a lawyer, I always kinda look at my role with my clients as being a teacher. You know, how do I teach them the complex world that I live in daily? And I think GuidePoint did an excellent job in doing that for me. As I’ve moved forward and, you know, I try to implement measures to make sure an event like this never happens again, I’m still able to use that jargon and understanding.

If I had to do this over again knowing what I know to knowing what I know today, the one thing that I think I would do differently is I would have called GuidePoint immediately. If you do unfortunately find yourself in an event like this, call GuidePoint, get them on your side, and have them do what they do best.