Cybersecurity

Summary: Most small-business websites run on WordPress, and the biggest risk is usually old plugins that nobody has updated. Attackers scan the web for these known weak spots and use the sites they find to spread malware, post spam, or steal what visitors type into forms. Keeping the site and its plugins updated, and knowing who is responsible for that, prevents most of it.Your website is one of those things you set up once and then stop thinking about. It sits there doing its job, so there’s no reason to touch it. That’s exactly why a neglected website is one of the common ways a small business gets hacked.Most small-business sites run on WordPress, which powers more than 40% of all websites, according to W3Techs. WordPress itself is solid. The risk is usually the plugins and themes added to it, which often don’t get updated for years.How a neglected website

Summary: Scammers buy ads on Google and other search engines using the names of trusted brands and software, so their fake site shows up at the very top, above the real one. Click it and you can land on a fake page that steals your login or installs malware. You can avoid nearly all of it by skipping the sponsored results and going to the real website yourself.When you search Google for a program to download or a website to log into, the first thing you see is usually an ad. It sits at the top, marked “Sponsored,” and most people click it without a second thought, because the top result is normally what you wanted.Scammers count on that. They buy ads on the names of trusted companies and popular software, so their fake site appears right at the top, above the real one, and you click it thinking it’s

Summary: Scammers now use AI to write their phishing emails, so the spelling and grammar mistakes that used to give them away are gone. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre and the FBI both warn that AI makes these messages cleaner, more personal, and harder to spot. The way to catch them now is to look at what an email is asking you to do, because the writing no longer gives anything away.For years, the advice for spotting a scam email was simple: look for bad spelling and clumsy grammar. A real bank or supplier writes properly, the thinking went, so a message full of mistakes was probably fake. It was easy to teach, and for a long time it worked.It doesn’t anymore. Scammers now use AI to write their emails, and AI writes cleanly. The typos and awkward phrasing that used to give phishing away are gone, and the

Article Summary: If your business is hit by a cyberattack, the first hour matters. Disconnect the affected devices from the network instead of powering them off, call your IT provider by phone, and leave the evidence in place. If money was wired to a scammer, call your bank right away. This post is the step-by-step plan, plus where to report an attack in the US, UK, and Australia.If a cyberattack hits your business, what you do in the first hour really matters.It’s also the easiest time to make a costly mistake, like turning off the wrong machine, deleting evidence, or replying from an email account the attacker is already reading.The steps below tell you what to do, in order, so you’re not guessing in the moment.Doing these steps doesn’t require technical knowledge.Before anything else: don’t make it worseBefore you touch anything, avoid these:Don’t turn the affected computer off, if you

Article Summary: A passkey lets you sign in to an app or website using the same fingerprint, face, or PIN you use to unlock your phone or laptop, with no password to type. It’s built on a security standard called FIDO that can’t be phished, because the passkey only works on the real site and there’s no password to steal or reuse. Most major platforms and a growing list of business tools support passkeys, and Microsoft 365 includes them at no extra cost. For most businesses, it’s worth starting to roll them out, beginning with the most sensitive accounts.Passwords are the weak point in most businesses.People reuse them across accounts, write them on sticky notes, and type them into convincing fake login pages without realizing it.Passkeys are the technology built to replace passwords, and they fix the parts that cause the most trouble.A passkey lets you sign in with the

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

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

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

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

It’s a statistic that sends a shiver down the backs of SME owners, managers and employees.  According to the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, business email compromise (BEC) cost US businesses more than $3 billion last year.This makes it one of the most financially damaging cybercrimes on record. AI has made these attacks harder to detect. The question for AP teams is no longer whether they can identify suspicious requests. It is whether the processes around payments make fraud difficult regardless of how convincing it looks.Why AP Teams Are in the CrosshairsAccounts payable sits at the intersection of trust and timing. AP teams process invoices, manage supplier details, and execute payments, often under pressure to keep operations running smoothly. For attackers, that combination is ideal.Most successful fraud does not involve breaking into systems. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)  has consistently found that BEC attacks rely on impersonation. This involves posing as a