Reply from iNSYNQJul 24, 2019
Kristin,
Having held a senior finance & accounting role at a former company I worked at (Tradeweb), your note here resonates with me in a uniquely profound way. I applaud and appreciate you explicitly acknowledging that you are relatively understanding that this event has taken place. And I hear you loud and clear that your frustrations center around the fact that you feel that you have not received anywhere near the amount of information you would expect, and that you feel that iNSYNQ has not been appreciative of the magnitude of the impact that this event has had on your business. Moreover, you feel that the information that you have received, has been inaccurate in nature - a point that I'd be interested in personally diving into so I can hear more of the specifics around as soon as we're back up and running and you and I can hopefully connect directly.
I'm going to force myself to use brevity here more so than I otherwise would (simply because I'm focusing so much on making sure that you and the rest of our customers are restored as quickly as possible). I assure you that there will be a lot more information and dialogue to come once we've successfully gotten everyone up and running again.
With respect to whether any customers were truly restored as we have publicly stated: I absolutely appreciate where your skepticism comes from here, especially after reaching out to a local accounting firm that uses iNSYNQ to host its QuickBooks. We are all very disappointed with the amount of time it has taken us to: a) get anyone up and running; and, b) how quickly we've been able to get people up and running since we started. I assure you that our claim here was absolutely a true one. There have been a number of people that have been restored (a number of which were turned on Monday). With that said, in the scheme of things it was still a relatively small number, and we are still not even up to the 50% mark. For what it's worth, today is a big day, and we are turning users back on at a much faster speed than we were able to on Monday and Tuesday. We will not have everyone up and running by the end of today, but we are shooting to cross that 50% threshold tonight, or by early tomorrow morning. Obviously 50% doesn't do anything for a lot of our customers, and we hate that we can't turn everyone on altogether. If we could, we obviously would. Unfortunately, there have been a ton of steps in this process, there have been surprises constantly popping up as we grind internally to get all of our customers online, and we have tried throughout the process (as tempting as it has been at times to cut corners) to be obsessively defensive of your data. We have also been faced with a number of points where we've been faced with decisions where we could expedite things in exchange for adding risk of setting the whole effort all the way back to the beginning, or worse yet - risk exposing customers to even more negative impact.
With respect to your objections to the lack of information, and concerns over the accuracy of information at a high level: this has maybe been the most frustrating piece of the puzzle for us, because we want nothing more than to be able to have shared a very high volume of information with customers throughout every single one of the eight days that have passed. We have also wanted nothing more than to be much more specific in the nature of facts we know and the details of the information that we have had. You are fair to criticize the amount of information we have provided. Part of the problem here is that because of the complexities of the attack, we were unfortunately limited in what we ourselves even knew to be true for much of this process, particularly early on. But we wanted to be sure to not artificially elaborate on how much we knew when we were still gathering information ourselves, which has been a grueling process. We have learned a huge amount in the later stages of this process, but early on, in full transparency, we were still trying to figure things out ourselves and also had inflection points where we uncovered evidence relating to information that might have been true, but felt too speculative to share. But the most important piece of the puzzle here is that this was an attack that was targeted towards our organization. We've had to be very careful not to publicize information that could be used against us by the organization that attacked us (this unfortunately continues to be a dynamic we have to be mindful of).
I absolutely would like to connect directly with you once the dust has settled, and will use the TrustPilot feature that allows me to follow-up with you directly to try and coordinate a time to connect as soon as we are closer to the mountain top than we currently are because it's a very challenging balancing act right now of focusing on making progress, with managing the communications side of things.
Hopefully we'll have your company back up and running some time today or tonight. If not, I'd tell you that there is a high likelihood that you'll be back on by tomorrow, or Friday at the latest assuming there aren't too many more surprises, which I'm cautiously optimistic there won't be given the significant momentum we now have in turning people on that's taking place as we speak.
Kind Regards,
Elliot Luchansky
CEO, iNSYNQ