The words in the above headline proved prophetic recently when Wright Engineers was hit with a vicious ransomware virus that corrupted our data and fried our servers.  Fortunately, our cyber security measures and backup protocol were enough to keep our data safe, though it still took the better part of a week to get all our systems back up.

What we’ve learned from this is that the cyber security measures we implemented were critical to our surviving the attack.  We felt we had a bulletproof plan, yet we were still vulnerable.  We sincerely hope you’re never the victim of a ransomware attack, but if it happens you’ll be glad you put safety measures in place including privileged accounts that limit a user’s ability to install and run software on network devices, redundant data back ups in separate devices and stored offline, automatically updated anti-virus and anti-malware protection, and cyber insurance coverage as a safety net.

 

MARKETING EXCELLENCE AWARD

Wright Engineers’ monthly news (yup, this thing you’re now reading) has been honored with a 2019 Marketing Excellence Award by the Zweig Group, the nation’s leader in enhancing business performance for AEC firms.   Wright’s monthly publication ranked number 2 nationwide for all AEC firms in the External Newsletter category.  “Winning an award in 2019 is even more significant than prior years”, said Kyle Ahern, Awards Manager and Consultant at Zweig, because there were “double the number of entrants” as prior years.  Ahern also noted that it is very impressive for us to rank so high since this is the first time we’ve submitted for the award.

Wright news has gone out each month for over 20 years, beginning with the first edition issued in January 1999.  “That was the beginning of our second year in business”, said founder and CEO Brent Wright, “I wanted to be in front of clients and prospective clients on a regular basis with something useful they’d actually look at.  Back then, paper copies were folded by hand and mailed – my mom was our official newsletter folder and envelope stuffer.”

Readers tell us a highlight  is the “Right Brain” cartoon drawn by Brent Wright himself, who confirms that, “It’s fun to spend a little time each month doing something that exercises the right side of my brain.”  The past 20 years of Right Brain cartoons can be found on the Right Brain website.