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Offline backups are not a complete solution. What if your backups are infected with the virus? Even if the backups are uninfected, your IT department has to manually scrap and rebuild all your computers from data centers to the warehouse to the receptionist. And in the meantime, like the article described, you have to pay your employees and suppliers and continue to ship products to customers.

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Wired did a phenomenal article on the Maersk attack https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-rus... company I worked for was affected as we had shipping containers on the water at the time and it was chaos but they recovered.

An important part of any backup strategy is testing your backups on a regular basis. Perhaps it could even be automated...

I think the point here is that it's not as trivial as having an offline copy of your SQL DB or whatever. If the ransomware has encrypted a huge chunk of your infra the chances are that you no longer have anything to restore the backup to — maybe your configurations are encrypted, your DB hosts aren't up, user accounts etc are missing. Assuming that only user data is affected and can be easily restored likely falls very short of the full picture. I expect the folks at Garmin are faced with an infrastructure that looks like a grenade fell into it.

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