Perennial Software Services Back Online After Cyber Attack

Customers of Perennial Software’s AlarmBiller and SedonaOne cloud-based management applications were without access to the systems for several days beginning the weekend of July 14 due to a cyber attack.

Perennial Software sent a statement to its customers explaining that the cause of its datacenter outage is a cyber attack. The statement, which was sent via email just after 4 p.m. on July 16, read, “We have engaged several teams of internal and external experts, including a highly respected cyber forensics team. Together, we are in the process of bringing systems back online in stages and restoring service
as soon as possible.”

According to Perennial's final update on the matter, which went out July 23, all SedonaOffice and AlarmBiller was restored to all customers with all data intact. The email update went on to say that Perennial did not identify “any evidence to indicate that company, employee or customer data has been  exfiltrated or compromised.”

Perennial said it is performing a deep audit of its systems and controls and is implementing enhanced security measures.

Alan Hallman, vice president of Crown Security Systems, Fayetteville, Ga., said the interruption to  AlarmBiller severely hampered Crown’s ability to operate. “The dealers that depend upon this cloud-based solution are completely paralyzed by this outage,” he said during the outage.

Hallman said Crown migrated all its data in February to the cloud-based system, but now they will have to rethink that model.

Another dealer who wished to remain unnamed, said, “We provide service, monitoring and inspections for commercial properties. Our service base is the heart of our company as that was how it started. One of our service dispatchers still writes every call and appointment in a diary before opening a ticket. Only because of that archaic process did we know where most of the appointments were.”

“I am just shocked at the way this is being handled,” the dealer continued. “After all, we are in the life safety business, and we are really crippled — not to mention the downtime and expense of paying our office staff to wait for the system to be restored. There’s only so much busy work they can do.”

So far Perennial Software has not returned calls to SDM for comments.