Boom Construction

Established in 1994, Boom Construction Company (BCC) is one of Qatar’s largest contracting firms, and the leading company under the Boom Group

Supporting Qatar’s 2030 National Vision goal of environmental development through state-of-the-art infrastructure, mega-projects, parks, and transportation, Boom Construction’s mission is to provide construction services of the highest standards. The company offers a wide range of services, including roadwork, utility infrastructure, parks, and landscaping, as well as civil works and building construction which is provided through a companion company.

Boom Construction was running its geographically-disperse IT infrastructure on many servers and has more than 750 employees working on desktops and laptops across multiple networks—in offices, on construction sites, at home, and overseas.

They lacked the ability to gain full visibility and control over the IT infrastructure to prevent, detect, and investigate cyberattacks. The company did not have a security operations team in place, so the lack of security personnel intensified this issue. 

“As Qatar’s construction industry grows, Boom Construction needed to enhance cybersecurity to stop cyberattacks and maintain business uptime,” said Mohammed Ali Hosho, senior IT manager, Boom Construction. “With many of Boom Construction’s employees working remotely, our on-premises solutions were not able to detect issues on remote endpoints, we could not easily push updates to all of the computers or conduct preventive action against cyber threats.”

In March 2020, Boom Construction faced every IT professional’s worst nightmare: A massive ransomware attack on the head office. All of the company’s servers were down, which meant more than 200 users had no access to business applications, email, or internet.

When the ransomware attack hit—a weekend in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown— Mohammed Ali Hosho contacted several vendors for help, but it was Trend Micro that took action. Even though Boom Construction was not yet a customer, Trend Micro engineers were able to identify the ransomware, locate the source of entry, and offer continued support to control the damage using trial versions of Trend Micro Cloud One™, Trend Micro™ Deep Discovery™ Inspector and Trend Micro Vision One™ (with XDR). 

Within one week, Boom Construction restored all of its servers from a tape backup and had a stable IT environment. Within 15 days, it was live again. Normally, a ransomware attack on a company of its size would take around two months to resolve, the extra seven weeks of downtime would have costed the company roughly USD 1.5 million.

“Post-incident, some asked why I was adamant to our board on only working with Trend Micro when it comes to security. I’ve been in the field for more than 15 years, handling several providers. The first thing they require is for you to place an order, even though you may be in an emergency situation. Trend Micro surprised me, they didn’t ask me for a PO, they asked for my location and sent their team. They came, they took action, we caught the virus. After all was done, they didn’t invoice me, they asked me if I was fine and if the situation was stable. It’s not only about them having the best products in the market, but is also about the quality of their people”

"The security transformation that Boom Construction has implemented with Trend Micro solutions has saved us invaluable time and millions of dollars of avoided business downtime."

Mohammed Ali Hosho
Senior IT Manager, Boom Construction

Boom Construction replaced its legacy antivirus software with a wide range of Trend Micro SaaS solutions.

The foundation of Boom Construction’s cybersecurity is XDR, which provides detection, prevention, and response across email, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks.

Boom Construction has also deployed Trend Micro Apex One™ for endpoint security and USB device control, Deep Discovery Inspector for 360-degree visibility of traffic monitoring, Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Suites, and Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Workload Security for automated workload protection.

"By running on Trend Micro’s cloud-based solutions, our IT environment is more than 95% secure from cyberattacks, including viruses, phishing attempts, malware, and ransomware."

Mohammed Ali Hosho
Senior IT Manager, Boom Construction

Previously, Boom Construction was facing more than 1,000 cyberattacks per week. Since deploying Trend Micro solutions, Boom Construction has stepped up its prevention measures, and now faces one or two cyberattacks per day—all neutralized. 

Since March 2020, Boom Construction has detected more than 10 cases of ransomware, all of which have been prevented from doing damage. Now, most of the cyberattacks are coming from employees trying to access untrusted links, rather than targeted attacks on the company.

Previously, threat investigation had to be done onsite, and security posture reports took five to six hours. Now, they are available in real time, without the need to physically visit remote sites. Trend Micro solutions complete the whole process of identifying, preventing, and remediating cyberattacks—speeding up investigation and response. 

"The security transformation that Boom Construction has implemented with Trend Micro solutions has saved us invaluable time and millions of dollars of avoided business downtime."

Mohammed Ali Hosho
Senior IT Manager, Boom Construction

"Thanks to this partnership, we now have full visibility and control over our IT infrastructure, can quickly and easily provide threat intelligence reports to the board, and support our employees’ remote work."

Mohammed Ali Hosho
Senior IT Manager, Boom Construction

Boom Construction is continuing to train its IT team and employees on strengthening their security posture.