Eat Cook Joy refused a ransom demand and got its entire platform back

In a first-person account for Crunchbase News, founder Zainab Ghadiyali says that on a January morning in 2026, two weeks before the public launch of Eat Cook Joy — AI-powered tools for private chefs built on two and a half years of data assembly — she was locked out of her own site. She says the attack bore the signs of an international crime group that targets early-stage startups for ransom, per FBI intelligence, and cites Veeam research finding 93% of cyber attacks now target backup storage to force payment.

Her response, she writes, started with a non-negotiable goal — recover all data, restore the platform, bring it online securely — and a team built for it. Most advisers dismissed the loss or urged a claim; she hired Amy Mushahwar of Lowenstein Sandler, whose colleague Tricia Wagner spent a birthday consolidating evidence for law enforcement. The strategy: patience, detailed evidence and fearlessness — whenever the ring denied access or claimed data was deleted, the team answered with proof to the contrary, leaning on her deeper knowledge of the site and the lawyers' law-enforcement ties.

While negotiations ran, she shifted Eat Cook Joy's operations offline to protect customer data, doubled engineering resources, fixed security vulnerabilities and reinforced protections around intellectual property. Within weeks of the demand, she says, the crime ring transferred everything back. Two weeks after regaining full control the site was taking production traffic again; within six months of launch the chef network tripled; the company was on track for $1 million in annualized revenue that fall — all figures self-reported in the essay.

All data came back within weeks; traffic resumed two weeks after recovery; chef network tripled; $1M ARR on track (self-reported).

Veeam research cited in the essay finds 93% of cyber attacks target backup storage to force payment, and most leaders in her position would have made a deal.

Investors had entrusted her with their money, and her training as an engineer and entrepreneur would not let her capitulate.

She had built large-scale infrastructure at Facebook and Airbnb, so she knew the site's technical details better than the attackers did.

She chose lawyers who shared the goal and had law-enforcement relationships, and documented everything to contradict each of the ring's denials.

If backups and keys mean you can walk away, refuse to pay: set a non-negotiable goal, hire lawyers with law-enforcement ties, and document evidence that corners the attackers' lies.

She reports the ring returned everything within weeks of the demand. Two weeks after full control was restored, Eat Cook Joy was back on production traffic; the chef network tripled within six months of launch, and the company was on track for $1 million in annualized revenue in the fall of 2026 — all self-reported. Ghadiyali is now building Stackbirds, a platform for AI agent technology.