On Saturday, January 27th at approximately 2AM EST CSI (Viirtue’s tax rating

engine partner) was the victim of a ransomware attack. The event caused

CSI’s infrastructure and services to become unavailable. ViiBE’s billing and

quoting capabilities started to experience error conditions as they directly

rely on CSI’s APIs.

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To keep ViiBE operational, Viirtue implemented a kill switch that would allow

us to bypass tax rating until CSI recovered. This action restored the ability to

manage quotes, billing periods, and orders at the expense of taxes not being

computed due to the CSI APIs being down.

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When CSI’s tax rating services were restored at approximately January 31th

9:30 EST, we proactively updated usage and re-rated any uninvoiced billing

periods. Subsequently, we generated invoices for any billing periods that

were slated to be invoiced. Once billing periods were invoiced, autopay and

other system functions were shown to be operating nominally.

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To summarize a communication from CSI’s CEO: Despite having 6+ years of

successful SOC audits, bad actors found an attack vector they successfully

exploited. CSI engaged a third party to perform forensics and assist with

brining up a new and hardened environment. Additionally, they have

implemented a new disaster recovery process that would take hours and not

days to restore.