- The ransomware attack of November, 2019 came to us on
an early Saturday morning.
- I got a call from my manager,  it's all hands on deck.
- They escalated to me saying we need you to come in
and take a look with us on next steps.
- [Adam] Yeah, just sort of seeing everything
that we've built like slowly fall apart.
- [Nathaniel] Nunavut is a very large section of Canada.
It's 1/5 of the landmass of all of Canada.
None of the communities have any interconnecting roads
and such, so everything is fly-in.
- All 25 communities had to be taken offline.
- The decision to shut everything down
had very critical impact to services such as our payroll
for employees, healthcare, checks for both employees
or for people on income assistance.
- The DART team came in, officially took over,
and just got us the professional help that we needed
at that point.
- The DART team gave us two very positive paths.
One directly into investigating the incident
and identifying how the incident happened,
but they also provided direct access into prepping
for a go-forward.
Recommendations around security access,
to being able to onboard new services quickly, efficiently,
and effectively.  With the support of DART
and the direct access with our partnerships with Microsoft,
we were able to successfully rebuild over 800 servers
and over 5,000 desktops within the six-week period
in all 25 of Nunavut's communities.
- For me, it was pretty tough 'cause I didn't see my family
for close to a month just because when I left,
they were sleeping, when I came home, they were sleeping.
- [Nathaniel] We chose to deploy Sentinel
with the recommendations from the DART team.
It is our first point of contact when investigating any
of our security events here in the government.
- The way that Microsoft is constantly changing
and updating things and tweaking this and tweaking that,
it makes it a dynamic tool in the sense that
it's always keeping up with whatever's happening outside.
- The impact of partnering with Microsoft on moving forward
with this solution has given me the trust,
I can sleep at night.
I'm most proud of our team at being able to tackle such
a monumental event and recognizing that we can trust
in working with our partners to be able to fix,
as well as now go forward and maintain
a secure space for us.