Case Study: Lewis County Public Utility District achieves 2-hour ransomware recovery and avoids a $10M ransom with Rubrik

LCPUD Mitigates Cyber Breach in 2 Hours with Rubrik

Lewis County Public Utility District (LCPUD) provides power to roughly 35,000 residents and must keep systems available 24x7 to protect public safety. After centralizing backups on Rubrik Security Cloud in 2017, the utility was hit by a phishing-driven ransomware attack in July 2019 that began encrypting desktops and servers and threatened prolonged downtime, data loss, a potential $10M ransom demand, and disruption of critical services.

Because Rubrik’s immutable, air-gapped backups allowed rapid containment and recovery, LCPUD restored systems in about two hours (one server in 1 minute 24 seconds), avoided paying the ransom, and experienced no data loss or citizen impact. The incident reinforced the value of Rubrik, led the district to expand to Enterprise Edition and the full Rubrik Security Cloud suite, and materially improved its cyber resilience.

Lewis County Public Utility District

Jeff Baine

Information Systems Manager