All posts by Jose Luis

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Article Summary: Email spoofing is when a scammer sends a message that appears to come from your domain, often to trick your clients or staff into paying a fake invoice or changing banking details. Three DNS records (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) prove that a message really came from you and tell receiving mail servers to reject the ones that didn’t. The catch is that DMARC only protects you once it’s set to “quarantine” or “reject,” and a lot of businesses leave it on “none,” which monitors but does not block.Right now, with no special tools, someone could send an email that looks like it came from your company.The From line would show your domain, your logo could be pasted into the message, and it could ask one of your clients to pay an invoice or update banking details. This is called email spoofing, and it is one of the most

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Article Summary: A QR code scam, sometimes called quishing, hides a malicious web link inside a QR code. Because the link is buried in an image instead of written as text, it slips past the email filters that normally catch bad links, and scanning the code usually moves the victim onto a personal phone that sits outside the company’s security. Microsoft reported a 146% rise in QR code phishing during the first quarter of 2026.QR codes are part of normal business now.You scan them to see a menu, pay for parking, connect to Wi-Fi, or open a shared document. Attackers know that, and they have started hiding malicious links inside QR codes to get past the security tools that would normally catch a bad link in an email.The technique has a name, quishing, and it works because a QR code is just an image.Your email filter reads text, so a link

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Small businesses are the most common ransomware target by volume of incidents, even though many small business owners assume hackers focus on larger organizations. A 22-person company has enough revenue to be worth attacking, no dedicated security team to defend it, and a publicly traceable footprint that takes about an hour to research.What follows is a step-by-step walkthrough of how a small business gets attacked, written from the attacker’s side. The company in this account is composite, but the methods are accurate to current threat intelligence reporting. After the walkthrough, you’ll see five specific points where the attack would have been stopped by controls that come bundled with security tools most small businesses already pay for.Monday: how I picked youI work regular hours and run a small volume operation. My spreadsheet has about 40 prospects per month, and I prefer businesses between 10 and 50 staff. The reason for that

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If you have a cyber insurance renewal coming up, the application is probably longer than the one you filled in last time. It’s also more specific. Each new question maps to a control that, if missing, allowed a major 2023 or 2024 claim to escalate. The wording reflects how carriers responded to losses they paid in 2023 and 2024, and how you answer the form matters more than it used to.This post covers why the application got longer, what each new section is asking, how to answer honestly without overstating your controls, and what to fix in the 30 days before submission. The expensive mistake on a cyber insurance application is rescission, where a future claim is denied because the carrier finds that the controls you declared were not in place at the time.Why the renewal application got longerThe current generation of cyber insurance applications was shaped by three specific

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By the time an employee hands in their notice, the decisions that will make their departure clean or messy have already been made. They were made in the first weeks of the person’s tenure, when nobody was paying close attention because the new hire had just arrived and there were a hundred other things to do. A shared login here, a quick SaaS sign-up there, a personal laptop used until the company hardware arrived. By month six, none of those feel like decisions at all. They feel like how things are.This post covers what’s really going wrong when offboarding takes three weeks, the four onboarding shortcuts that guarantee a painful exit, how to retrofit hygiene on the team you already have, and what your IT provider should be doing at onboarding that probably isn’t happening.What’s really going wrong when offboarding takes three weeksA clean offboarding takes about 90 minutes of

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A safe Microsoft Copilot rollout starts with a permissions audit before any trial license is enabled. Microsoft 365 Copilot retrieves files, emails, and chats using each user’s existing Microsoft 365 permissions. In most tenants, those permissions are broader than anyone has mapped, because access tends to accumulate across years of projects, ad-hoc sharing, and staff changes. Microsoft itself now recommends a specific cleanup before any trial: map who currently has access to what, fix the permissions that have drifted out of scope, and apply sensitivity labels to confidential content.This post covers what Microsoft 365 Copilot does with permissions, where oversharing tends to show up in a typical tenant, the kinds of content Copilot can return when permissions are broad, how to run the audit Microsoft recommends, and what to fix before any rollout.How Microsoft 365 Copilot accesses your dataCopilot answers questions and generates content by retrieving information through Microsoft Graph,

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Microsoft has tightened several default settings in Microsoft 365 over the past few years. Newer tenants get more protection out of the box than tenants set up before 2022 or so. The problem is that legacy configurations stay in place. A setting changed for new tenants in 2024 doesn’t retroactively change in yours, and historical user consents, inbox rules, or sharing links granted before the change are still active.Here are five settings worth checking in your tenant, especially if it’s more than two or three years old, was set up by a previous IT provider, or has not been audited in a while.A few caveats before we start. Some of these settings require Microsoft 365 Business Premium, E3, or E5 licensing to change, so if a toggle is grayed out, your license tier is most likely the reason. A couple of these changes will generate support tickets from your team

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Cyber insurance applications include a question that catches a lot of small business owners off guard: “Do you maintain immutable, air-gapped, or offline backups of your critical business data?”Carriers added that question to renewal forms because ransomware operators worked out that the fastest way to force a payout is to wipe the backups first and encrypt everything else after. CISA, the FBI, and the Internet Crime Complaint Center have all documented this pattern as one of the most common moves in current ransomware playbooks. A business whose backup copies can be deleted using the same admin credentials an attacker just stole has no recovery path other than paying the ransom.This post covers what immutable backup means, three common backup setups that do not qualify, the questions to send your IT provider before you sign the form, and what to do if your honest answer is no.Immutable backup, definedAn immutable backup

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Most cyberattacks do not start with a sophisticated intrusion. They start with a click on a personal email, a reused password, or a file uploaded to a familiar cloud service because the approved option felt slower.The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that 68% of breaches involve the human element. Not a zero-day exploit. Not a brute-force attack on a hardened system. Human behavior, in the course of an ordinary working day.For businesses running cloud-based workflows across multiple devices, the personal and professional overlap is now the rule. Understanding where that overlap creates risk is no longer optional. It is a core part of modern security strategy.The Risk Sitting Outside Your Security StackPersonal web habits are not reckless behavior. They are normal behavior.Checking a personal inbox on a work laptop. Logging into a social account during a break. Saving a work password in a browser already loaded with personal accounts. Uploading

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Your team locks everything down with passwords. Some are strong, some are not, and most have been reused somewhere over the years. Every month, IT fields reset requests. Every year, the same breach reports list stolen credentials as the leading cause.There is now a more effective path, and it does not require users to memorize anything. Passkey migration is the process of moving from traditional passwords to passkeys: a form of phishing-resistant authentication that uses your device’s built-in security instead of a shared secret. It is practical, it is already supported by most major platforms, and the business case is hard to argue with.Why Passwords Are Still the Biggest RiskPasswords have had sixty years to prove themselves. The data tells a consistent story.More than 80% of data breaches involve compromised credentials, a figure that has remained consistent year after year, according to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report.The underlying problem has not