ProImage NewsWayX cloud workflow enables the Kingsport Times-News to publish after local virus attack

Dec 18, 2023

“The Faust ransomware, a Phobos ransomware family variant, had encrypted our entire Virtual SAN infrastructure, Dan Strickler, system manager, The Kingsport (Tennessee) Times-News.

PRINCETON, New Jersey – On Saturday, Oct. 28, ProImage received an urgent phone call from The Kingsport (Tennessee) Times-News, owned by Six Rivers Media LLC.

The Times-News was the first newspaper to serve Kingsport. First printed weekly as the "Progress," in Johnson City, it later started semi-weekly editions and thrived with the prospering city. Daily publication began in 1924.

THE INCIDENT

Dan Strickler, system manager, received a cellphone call from one of their morning weekend employees stating that the phone system was not operable. Dan said, “After checking the phone systems power and finding everything normal, I noticed that we were unable to access our virtual systems that run our data center. It is believed that an internal user opened a malicious hyperlink. It appears that the malicious program ran early morning on Oct. 28, 2023.

“The Faust ransomware, a Phobos ransomware family variant, had encrypted our entire Virtual SAN infrastructure. The encryption caused us to have to rebuild the system. After restoring the infrastructure, we started the long problematic recovery process.”  

Strickler continued, “The ransomware also encrypted our in-house ProImage NewsWayX workflow system servers, so we had no way to output pages internally. Chris Jones, our prepress supervisor, reached out to ProImage at 7:30 p.m. to see what they could possibly do to help us through this situation.

THE SOLUTION

Tony, at ProImage support, reached back out to Chris within minutes of his initial support call. 

Chris said, “Tony was able to work with us and setup a cloud instance for us to use to process the pages via FTP. This process worked well, and within two and a half hours ProImage cloud workflow was operational, and we had no problems getting the pages processed and output through our CTP systems. We were able to produce pages and deliver a printed product to our customers on Monday morning. All five of our publications had to be moved to the cloud. We have two daily newspapers and three weeklies that publish every Wednesday.”

“We had several folks from different companies help during the recovery process, but we felt ProImage was the best support team we worked with, and we are grateful for the help they provided,” Strickler said. 

“We were also surprised to find out that ProImage has over 60 customers using NewsWayX in a Cloud workflow environment,” Tim Archer, VP of operations, said.

CLOUD BENEFITS AND DECISION

The Kingsport Times-News has since decided to move to ProImage’s AWS based redundant NewsWayX Cloud workflow permanently. The ProImage hosted solution provides The Kingsport News-Times Publications a custom workflow on our Cloud servers with no single point of failure. Their users have logons just as if the servers were local to softproof, approve and track pages and plates. Plate ready Tiffs are automatically sent to their local CTP devices for output. ProImage maintains the Servers, RIPs and Software so versions are always current and protects against future virus threats.

ABOUT PROIMAGE

New ProImage, an ECO3 Company is a leading developer of browser-based automated workflow, ink optimization, press registration, color image processing, and production tracking solutions for the commercial and newspaper printing and publishing industries. Using a standard Internet browser, ProImage's advanced workflow technologies offer the printing industry flexible and feature-rich end-to-end automated workflow management.