Cybersecurity for Small Business

Ransomware, phishing, and business email compromise (BEC) are the three most common threats small businesses face. Ransomware encrypts your files and demands payment. Phishing tricks employees into providing credentials or authorizing fraudulent payments. BEC involves attackers impersonating executives or vendors to redirect payments.

All three rely on the same root causes: weak authentication, unpatched software, poor email security, inadequate employee training, and no tested backup and recovery plan. These are all fixable problems.

We start every business with a security baseline: MFA on all accounts (email, cloud apps, VPN), a password manager for the team, email authentication records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) to prevent your domain from being spoofed, endpoint protection on all business machines, and automatic operating system and application updates.

This baseline eliminates the majority of common attack vectors. Most successful attacks on small businesses exploit one of these gaps. Closing them is not expensive or complex, but it requires someone who knows what to configure and actually does it.

Ransomware only works if you have no clean backups to restore from. A proper backup strategy follows the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of data, on two different media types, with one copy offsite. For small businesses, this means local backups plus cloud backup with a tested restoration procedure.

Backups that have never been restored are not backups — they're hopes. We set up automated daily backups to encrypted offsite storage and verify restoration works quarterly. When ransomware hits (and statistically, it's when not if for a business operating for years), recovery takes hours, not weeks.

Technology controls catch automated attacks. Employee training catches social engineering. Phishing simulations — where we send fake phishing emails to your team and track who clicks — combined with targeted training have been shown to reduce click rates from 30%+ to under 5% in most organizations within a year.

We run quarterly phishing simulations and annual security awareness training, with immediate targeted training for users who click. This creates a measurable, improving security culture without burdening your team.