Her colleague, Tom, pulled the firewall logs. "Look at this," he said, pointing to a spike of outbound traffic from that same machine at 3:17 AM. The destination: an unknown IP address in Eastern Europe.
The answer was buried in the accounting user’s email inbox. Two days earlier, he had received a message that looked like an internal IT notice. The subject line read: "Urgent: RDP Configuration Update – Apply immediately."
The IT department of a mid-sized logistics company, "Apex Freight Solutions." RDP Break.zip
"How did it get in?" Maria asked.
Attached was a file named .
Because Maria and Tom acted fast—isolating the PC, resetting all RDP passwords, and forcing multi-factor authentication (MFA) on every remote connection—Apex Freight lost only three days of productivity in the accounting department. But a competitor across town wasn’t so lucky. They received the same "RDP Break.zip" email, and one click led to a full ransomware deployment that cost them $2 million.
The user, who frequently used Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to work from home, assumed the file was legitimate. He unzipped it. Inside was a seemingly harmless PDF file named "New_Settings.pdf.exe" – but Windows was set to hide known file extensions. All he saw was "New_Settings.pdf." When he double-clicked it, nothing appeared to happen. In reality, a small, silent backdoor had just burrowed into his system. Her colleague, Tom, pulled the firewall logs
It was a quiet Tuesday morning when Maria, a senior systems administrator at Apex Freight Solutions, received an urgent ticket. A user in accounting reported that his computer was "acting strangely"—the mouse was moving on its own, and files were being renamed.