The bad guys like to attack over holidays, so it's really not fun for me.

That's Curtis Minder, a renowned ransomware negotiator, telling me about a time when he picked

up an emergency call on a major holiday.

The initial call is always very emotional as you can imagine.

Even in the large companies, you know, you may have a boardroom of people, but it's very emotional.

On the other end of the call was a chemical manufacturing company who'd been locked out of their own assembly line.

They had a complete operational interruption so they couldn't manufacture their product.

Costs can add up quickly when a cyber attack delays at Game Studio's next release

or leads to a data breach to the bank.

But when attackers shut down a manufacturing line that's part of a global supply chain, you can almost see the money

circling the drain.

They were losing millions of dollars a day in revenue.

And for this chemical manufacturer, like with any business, shut down by ransomware,

the losses went way beyond a few days of missing shipments.

I call it the ransomware blast radius.

It's like, we know the basic impact.

It's operational interruption, but what about these other things?

And so that's cost of goods going bad, supplier confidence, that's, hey, wait, you didn't make

payroll for two weeks?

The attrition that just occurred, what did that cost you?

Those are all part of the fairly complex equation on

on total cost of impact. That formula, if you will, kind of helps us decide on

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