I still remember the exact moment I found out we’d been hit with Ransomware.
It was May 2018. I was at the breakfast table when my phone buzzed—a text from Eddie, our Chief Product Officer. It was a photo of his computer screen:

“If you want the encryption key to your data, transfer 0.8 Bitcoin per device or $40,000 for all encrypted devices.”

Bitcoin was trading around $8,000 at the time. I looked at the message, muttered an expletive, told my wife, “Gotta go,” and was out the door.

By the time I reached our Anaheim office from Huntington Beach, the damage was visible everywhere.
Employees stopped me in the hallway, holding up laptops showing the same ransom note Eddie had sent me. The entire productiondomain.com domain was paralyzed.

Here’s the part that still gets me: just one day earlier, Pat from Sidepath had called to talk about Cylance, the AI-driven endpoint protection platform.
I had written an article less than a year before titled “How to Thwart Ransomware Attacks and Prevent Future Attacks”—and Cylance was one of the tools I’d highlighted as a proactive defense.

We’d declined the $40,000 quote months earlier for “budgetary reasons.”
Now the ransom demand flashing on every screen was the exact same amount—$40,000.

You can’t script irony like that.