M. Natasha Labovitz was vacationing in New England in August 2014 when the bad news came: A just-completed debt refinancing for longtime client Altegrity Inc. was in trouble. Altegrity’s USIS background-screening division had been hit with cyberattacks, leading to massive breaches of U.S. Department of Homeland Security data, and the federal agency had suspended its contract with USIS.
The suspension cost Altegrity a third of its revenue, threatening a default that could have brought down the whole company, including two other divisions: investigations firm Kroll Inc. and employee screening company HireRight LLC. “When USIS was unable to deliver its part of the revenue, Kroll and HireRight would have defaulted on their debt if we couldn’t renegotiate it,” Labovitz says.
