The Day the Infrastructure Turned: A CISO's Post-Mortem of the Cuba Siege
In this blog, CXO Co-Founder Martin Bally discusses a "material" ransomware crisis triggered by a VPN zero-day vulnerability that bypassed traditional MFA and paralyzed global manufacturing operations. He details how decisive leadership—including the use of a pre-authorized "kill switch" and revenue-based recovery triage—saved the organization and prompted a permanent shift toward Zero Trust architecture and out-of-band authentication.
As a CISO, its critically important to share our lessons learned as well as our successes.
"The Day the Infrastructure Turned: A CISO's Post-Mortem of the Cuba Siege"
In crisis management, speed is nothing without direction. When we faced a breach from the Cuba ransomware variant, we didn't just rush to restore servers, we rushed to restore value.
This is the story of how we pivoted from a "security event" to a fully coordinated recovery operation. By prioritizing high-margin/high-impact sites, we achieved operational recovery in under two weeks of our tier 1&2 services.
Crucially, through tight coordination and transparency, we maintained the trust of our Board and leadership, keeping the fallout contained internally while the team executed a pragmatic staged recovery.
Read the full post-mortem on the "Kill Switch," the architectural pivot, and the 70/80 rule of decision-making.