The Company
Based in Ohio, real-estate solutions provider The Pagura Company has only three full-time employees but works with hundreds of contractors. Among other services, the company provides development, design, building and management of residential and commercial properties.
Steve Pagura, owner and founder, started The Pagura Company as a landscaping business in 1979 and has built it into an operation that now manages 21 properties across seven states, with more than 300,000 square feet of office and residential spaces.
The Challenge
A Pagura Company business partner received what he thought was a message from Steve Pagura instructing the partner to send tens of thousands of dollars from The Pagura Company to an architect as part of a deal. The partner sent the money.
Unfortunately, a cyberattacker was impersonating Steve Pagura. The message to the partner came from the attacker, not Pagura. And the money went to the attacker as well. The attacks didn’t end there, either. The attacker, still impersonating Pagura, claimed to have a great deal on lumber and asked for $500,000. By this time, Pagura had noticed the first transaction and instructed the business partner not to send any more money.
But there were still more cyberattacks. An attacker impersonated The Pagura Company’s financial manager, asking a customer to send a payment to a “new” Pagura Company bank account, which, of course, was an account controlled by the attacker. The customer thought the email looked suspicious and called The Pagura Company’s office, where employees confirmed that the email was a cyberattack.
Pagura contacted the vendor that provided his cybersecurity tools but received no help. At the time, he was also working with an IT consultant who said he couldn’t do anything to stop or mitigate the damage from the cyberattacks.
“I got no love from anybody,” Pagura says. “The vendor said it was my responsibility. My IT people told me they couldn’t do anything. I was surprised. You tell somebody when you’re burning up, and they say, ‘We can’t do anything for you.’”
The Solution
Pagura’s wife, Denise Pagura, had been running QuickBooks® Desktop in the Rightworks cloud with a different business for a couple of years when The Pagura Company cyberattacks occurred. Knowing that Rightworks provided managed security as well as cloud services, she suggested that her husband call Rightworks.
Why Rightworks?
Denise had been impressed with Rightworks’ customer service and knew that Rightworks could protect The Pagura Company’s data the way it had protected data for her agricultural business.
“Rightworks was awesome,” she said of her experience. “They were there all the way through, helping us get everything up and running.”
The Impact
Despite contacting the FBI and making an insurance claim, The Pagura Company never recovered the tens of thousands of dollars lost in the original cyberattack. But the company has not suffered damage from a cyberattack since moving to Rightworks two years ago. For Steve Pagura, that has brought some peace of mind given how heavily cyberattackers targeted his business.
“They followed us around when they got a payday,” he says. “We’re still getting phishing emails sent to us. Now, if it looks suspicious, I send it on to Rightworks. I’d rather not open a bomb.”
The Pagura Company has also taken advantage of security awareness training for employees so that staffers, including Pagura himself, know how to detect and avoid cyberthreats. They have also developed better cybersecurity habits; he figures the cyberattacks that targeted his company originated from an unsecured Wi-Fi connection at a remote location.
“There’s always a new trick” with cyberattackers, he says. “I like Rightworks’ tutorials. You’ve got an old dog like me that needs to know new tricks.”
Ultimately, Steve Pagura believes Rightworks is the most effective deterrent to damaging cyberattacks that his business has at its disposal.
“I trust you more than I trust insurance,” he says.