It’s been almost three years since business owners Carl Woerndle and his brother Alex were caught up in a cyber attack so damaging, it destroyed their once prospering technology business, Distribute.IT.
At this year’s CIO Summit in Perth, Woerndle – now a cyber security advisor at Deloitte – gave a warts and all account of how he and other staff at his former company dealt with the crisis and the fallout.
The brothers founded Distribute.IT in 2002, a typical startup working out of a spare room with, as Carl puts it, “no money, lots of good ideas and lots of enthusiasm".
At the time, the fledgling firm was granted one of five domain registrar licences available in the marketplace following moves by the government to place more control around domain name management, and remove Melbourne IT’s monopoly position.
The company adopted a channel sales strategy, appointing resellers to on-sell its services unlike its competitors, which were focusing on retail business.
Over the next nine years, the firm branched off into Web server hosting, in 2006 building its infrastructure around virtual server technology. By 2011, it was operating three data centres and was an Australian distributor for Verisign.
Distribute.IT had secured a 10 per cent market share for Australian domain names with 250,000 under management, and more than 200,000 clients on its books.
“We were growing at 4 per cent a month,” says Woerndle. “We also had over 30,000 hosting clients on that infrastructure ... and 3,000 active resellers on our database at that time.”
The company had more than 50 global domain name accreditations and opened an office in Jakarta, Indonesia as a launching pad to sell through Asia. It was looking at a couple of acquisitions and a possible IPO in 2014.