Ajay Bam is more tech-savvy than the average small-business owner. A coder by training, Bam started a business that delves into deep areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
And yet, Bam said, he wasn’t able to foresee or fend off a cyberattack that nearly sank his startup, Viryll, a service for online marketers, earlier this year.
Almost all of his company’s data was compromised in a widespread attack on MongoDB, a popular open-source database system that Vyrill had been using. The hackers were asking for a payout of $5,000 to return the information.
But the company was just getting started. It didn’t have that kind of money.
“We would have had to close the company if we were not able to restore that data,” Bam said. “I totally panicked.”
Bam was able to restore about 80 percent of his lost data from backups he had stored locally. The attack’s most lasting damage was to his sense of safety online.
So, Bam signed Viryll up for cybersecurity insurance. His is among a growing number of firms, technical and otherwise, that have sought protection.
To read the full article, head over to the San Francisco Chronicle.
