“David Cingari reaped the benefits of backing up a year ago, when an employee at his catering company came in around 7:30 a.m. to find her computer was taken hostage by ransomware. When she logged in, she got a notification that her files had been encrypted, or locked up so they couldn’t be read, and that it would take paying a ransom to get them unlocked.

“I just freaked out,” recalls Cingari, owner of David’s Soundview Catering in Stamford, Connecticut. But he quickly called the company that maintains his systems. Technicians replaced his files with safe ones that had been backed up offsite. Instead of losing $30,000 in sales and the cost of being robbed of all its information, the company was back in business around 10 a.m.

“That made it so effortless,” he says.”

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Author: Joyce Rosenberg, The Associated Press