As a small business owner, I never expected to pay $100,000 protecting my business from ransomware

As a small business owner in Columbia, Pa., I have always paid my taxes on time each and every year. My family started Susquehanna Glass in 1910 when my grandfather installed a cutting machine in a shed behind his house. I joined the business in 1975 and spent five dcades growing it into a company that serves customers across the country.

Three generations built something worth protecting. Then, an unexpected ransomware attack shut down our business one morning.

It was the first Tuesday in December, during our busiest season. We came in at nine o’clock and strange messages began popping up on screens across the building. An overseas group of criminals had found its way into our server and encrypted everything: financials, inventory, customer records, employee files with Social Security numbers and bank information. The software that runs our company froze. The machinery in the shop stopped. We shut down the factory and sent 40 employees home while I scrambled to wrest back control from criminals demanding a fortune.

The criminals demanded a million dollars to give me my own business back.

We were lucky in the strangest sense of the word. We had cyber insurance and backup hard drives the hackers deleted but did not encrypt. We overnighted those drives to a recovery company in........

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