I brought our two-year-old son to the annual Bring Your Kid to Work Day at my office. My wife was skeptical, feeling that he was too young to appreciate spending the day with me at the office and would be a burden on me. But I persuaded her that it would be fine and I’d be able to keep him entertained, so she reluctantly acquiesced.
Andy seemed to enjoy walking around the building and being introduced to my co-workers, who thought he was adorable, fawned all over him, and answered his never ending “what is that?” questions as he pointed to various objects around the office.
At around 10:45 I got called into my boss’ office for a meeting, so I sat Andy down in my chair in front of my computer monitors and streamed a cartoon movie for him to watch. I said, “Andy, be a good boy and watch the movie. I’ll be back soon.”
When I returned to my cubicle about an hour later, I noticed that my monitor screens were dark, but I didn’t think much of it as it was almost lunchtime, so I grabbed Andy and took him to the employee cafeteria.
When we got back from lunch, there was a sticky note from my boss stuck to my primary computer screen. I sat Andy back down in my chair and went to see my boss. He was not a happy camper.
“Someone opened an attachment and it installed ransomware onto our main server. They’re demanding one hundred thousand dollars in Bitcoins by close of business today or they’re going to start deleting all of our sensitive files, which they have encrypted so that we can’t access them.”
“That’s awful,” I said. “Who would be stupid enough to open up an attachment from someone they don’t know?”
“We traced it back to your computer,” my boss said. “Did you leave your computer on when you went to our meeting earlier?”
“Yeah, but I put a cartoon movie on for my son to watch,” I said.
“It seems that something popped up on the screen,” my boss said, “and your son began to cry and started pounding on the keyboard to get it off. In doing so, he must have accidentally opened up the ransomware and infected our network.”
“Oh shit,” I said. “Am I in trouble?”
“No,” my boss said, “but we’re canceling all future Bring Your Kids to Work Day events going forward.”
Written for this week’s #writephoto prompt. Photo credit: KL Caley.
This, That, and the Other 
If the Ransom scammers have already encrypted your files, they have no need to delete them, but I did enjoy your story.
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Shows how much I know about ransomware attacks! 😏
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It could happen!
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Great take on the prompt, and oh so true. Happened at my work and no they didn’t pay
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Whoopsies 😅
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Yikes. That was one expensive message
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Oh no! Frighteningly, I can easily imagine my LO doing that if something was to interrupt his beloved cartoons. Great Story. Thank you so much for joining in the challenge:
KL ❤
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Haha!
Enjoyed this one. 🙂
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Thanks for the reblog.
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Oh! Yes this is a great story! So scary because it could so easily be true 💜
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Don’t leave a toddler near a computer.
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I can so see this happening! A scary tale indeed.
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Don’t leave a kid alone with a computer. Yikes!
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