Adept I.T.

04/08/2026

Anyone can send an email that looks like it's from your company. Three DNS records stop it: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. The catch is DMARC is often set to 'monitor only,' which watches spoofing happen without blocking it. Ask your IT provider: is ours set to reject, or just none?

03/08/2026

Many ransomware groups delete your backups before they lock your files, so paying becomes the only way out. Keep one backup copy offline with its own login, separate from your admin password, and test a restore this month. If you've never tried it, you don't know it works.

INC Ransomware Emerges as Major RaaS Threat in 2026 with 830+ Victims Since 2023 | Read more hacking news on The Hacker News cybersecurity news website and learn how to protect against cyberattacks and software vulnerabilities.

30/07/2026

The old rules about strong passwords are out of date.

For years the standard advice was eight characters, mix uppercase and lowercase, throw in a number and a symbol. NIST, CISA, and Microsoft's own identity team all moved off that advice years ago. The current recommendation is simpler and stronger. Use long passwords or passphrases, and stop forcing your team to rotate them on a schedule.

The math is straightforward. Modern password-cracking hardware can guess a complex 8-character password in less than an hour. A 16-character passphrase made of common words takes centuries against the same hardware. Length wins because every extra character multiplies the work an attacker has to do, while complexity adds only modest barriers.

The policy update for your business is short. Set a minimum of 14 characters for general accounts and 16 or more for admin or sensitive ones. Mandatory rotation creates more weak passwords than it prevents, so stop forcing it. Required complexity rules tend to push people toward simpler, less secure patterns, so drop those too. Block any password that appears in known breach databases, and require MFA on every account that supports it.

If your business is still using 8-character passwords with quarterly rotation, you're following the rules from 2010. The new rules are easier on your team and harder on attackers.

29/07/2026

Most of the tools your team uses to get work done are probably not on your IT list.

Some examples: personal Dropbox accounts for client files, ChatGPT with confidential information pasted in, a Trello board the marketing team set up a year ago, a Notion workspace someone in operations runs from their phone. The name for all of this is shadow IT, and every business has more of it than you'd guess.

The risk shows up in two places. First, data that should live inside your business sits inside accounts you don't control and can't delete. When an employee leaves, the data stays where they put it. Second, none of those tools are configured with your security in mind. MFA settings are weak or off, and there's no data loss prevention, retention policy, or audit log to check when something goes wrong.

You don't need a top-down crackdown to fix this. Ask four questions in your next team meeting:

1. What software or web tool are you using this week that wasn't installed by IT?
2. Which one would slow your work down the most if it disappeared tomorrow?
3. Is any client or company data sitting in it?
4. Would you be embarrassed if it leaked in a breach?

Run the conversation as a fact-finding exercise. The helpful tools get sanctioned, the risky ones get replaced.

If you don't know what's running in your business, you can't protect it.

21/07/2026

If someone asks whether your business has backups, you probably say yes. Disaster recovery is a different question.

A backup is a copy of your data. Disaster recovery is the plan that brings your business back to running condition after something goes wrong. The two get confused all the time, and the confusion costs real money when ransomware or a hardware failure hits.

A good backup setup follows the 3-2-1-1-0 rule: three copies of every important file, on two different types of storage, with one copy stored offsite, one copy that's immutable so ransomware can't encrypt it, and zero errors in your last test restore.

That last one is what most businesses skip. Untested backups are not backups.

They're an unverified promise.

Pick a normal file, an email, and a full server volume, then try to restore each one to a different location.

If the restore works, you have backups. If it doesn't, you have a problem you can fix today instead of during an attack.

Disaster recovery goes one layer further. It's the playbook for what your business does when it can't function. Things like which systems come back first, which people make decisions, which vendors get called, and how long each step is supposed to take. Without that playbook, even a working backup leaves you guessing during the worst week of your year.

15/07/2026

"We're too small to be a target" is the most expensive belief in small business security today.

The math behind modern attacks runs the opposite direction. Attackers don't sit at desks picking targets one by one. They run automated scans that hit millions of IP addresses every day looking for known vulnerabilities. Once a scan finds an open port, an unpatched server, or a leaked password that still works, the attacker rolls in. They don't know or care how big your business is until they're already inside.

Industry data is consistent here. The Verizon DBIR, FBI IC3 reports, and Sophos State of Ransomware all show small and medium businesses make up the majority of confirmed cybercrime victims year after year. The volume keeps climbing.

The reason is simple. You hold most of the same data the big ones do (customer records, payment info, employee information), and you have fewer people watching for attacks. That makes your business faster to compromise and easier to monetize. Attackers don't need a billion-dollar prize. They need a quick, simple win, and your business qualifies.

If you've ever skipped a security investment because your business felt too small to matter, the math says otherwise.

14/07/2026

The first 24 hours after a suspected breach decide whether the next six months are manageable or catastrophic.

Most of the damage in those hours comes from actions that feel productive but cost you later. The order that works:

1. Stop. Don't touch infected machines or systems. The forensic evidence on them is what determines whether your insurer covers you and whether you can prosecute later.
2. Call your cyber insurance broker. They will assign you an incident response firm and a breach attorney, often within the hour. Both fees are usually covered by your policy.
3. Call your breach attorney before you call your IT person. The attorney creates legal privilege over everything that follows, which protects you if the incident ends up in court.
4. Let the incident response firm lead. They contain the attack, collect evidence, and advise on ransom decisions. Your job is to authorize the work, not perform it.
5. Notify law enforcement. FBI IC3 at ic3.gov, or your state's cyber unit. Required in some states, helpful in all of them.
6. Don't tell your team, customers, or social media anything until your attorney clears the message.

The first call you make matters more than every action that follows.

10/07/2026

MFA fatigue is one of the most common attacks on small businesses today, and most owners don't know it by name.

The attacker already has the password (bought from a leak or stolen from another site). They log in. The MFA push hits your employee's phone. They tap "Deny." The attacker tries again 10 seconds later. Then again at 2am. Then during lunch. Eventually someone taps "Approve" just to make it stop. The attacker is in.

Uber got hit this way in 2022. Cisco too. It still works on small businesses every week because passwords keep leaking and the push prompt looks identical to a real login.

Three things close the gap, and none of them are expensive. Switch your team from "tap to approve" to number matching, which both Microsoft Authenticator and Duo support out of the box and takes about 10 minutes to enable in your tenant. Then turn on geo-blocking or impossible-travel rules in your identity platform so logins from countries you don't operate in get blocked before the push ever fires. Last, give your team one rule: if you get an MFA prompt you didn't ask for, deny it AND report it. The report is what catches the attacker mid-attempt.

The attacker doesn't need a fancy hack. They just need someone tired enough to tap "Approve."

08/07/2026

Microsoft's phishing report for the first quarter of 2026 shows how much phishing has changed in the past year.

In three months:

-8.3 billion phishing threats detected
-QR code phishing up 146% from last year, with a 336% spike in March 2026 alone for QR codes hidden inside emails
-Phishing pages hiding behind CAPTCHA puzzles jumped 125%. CAPTCHAs make the pages look real AND stop security scanners from checking them.
-10.7 million business email compromise attempts in one quarter

Hackers moved from text to images, codes, and CAPTCHAs because text-based filters can't read them. Even an expensive email gateway misses most of this.

If your phishing training still shows examples of misspelled emails from "Nigerian princes," you're teaching your team history, not security.

What to do this month:

-Update your phishing training. If it doesn't include QR code emails and fake CAPTCHA login pages, you're testing 2023 skills against 2026 attacks.
-Tell your team one rule: any QR code that arrives in an email is suspicious. No exceptions.
-Ask your email security vendor what they catch for image and QR phishing. Get the answer in writing.

Train your team for the phishing they'll actually see this year.

Microsoft noted a marked increase in QR-code attacks and CAPTCHA delivery methods.

06/07/2026

The ransom is usually the smallest cost of a ransomware attack on a small business.

A 25-person company often takes 3 to 6 weeks to fully recover from one. Most of that cost has nothing to do with the criminals.

What 3 to 6 weeks of downtime actually costs you:

-Payroll. 25 people getting paid for a month or more with almost no productive output. Easily $200K to $400K, depending on your industry.
-Lost revenue. Whatever your business normally pulls in over that window, gone.
-Lost customers. Public breaches drive customer churn, especially in industries built on trust. Different studies put the rate anywhere from 5% to 30% in the year after.
-Outside costs. Incident response firm fees, breach lawyers, state notification rules, credit monitoring for affected customers.
-Higher insurance. Cyber premiums often double or triple at your next renewal.

You might pay the ransom once. The downtime bills you for months.

Want a fair estimate of your real exposure? Take your monthly payroll, multiply by 1.5. Add your monthly revenue times 1.5. Add 20% on top for everything else. That's the kind of number to put in front of your leadership team the next time someone asks why you're spending on security.