Almost nobody gets hacked the way it looks in films

The tell is usually small

An inbox rule appears on a mailbox. Nothing has been sent. Nobody has signed in from a strange country. A rule just quietly files anything mentioning an invoice into a folder nobody reads. That is somebody setting up to intercept a payment, and the whole event is one small change to one setting.

We caught exactly that at 10:28 on a Monday night, and wrote up what happened. That is what this is for. Not the dramatic attacks. The quiet ones.

What runs on your side

Every computer and server runs protection that blocks known attacks on its own. Email is filtered before it reaches anyone, which matters because email is how nearly all of it starts. Sign-in activity on your Microsoft 365 accounts is checked for things that do not fit, like someone logging in from a place none of your staff has ever been. Patches go on, because most successful attacks use a hole that was fixed months ago and never applied.

Your staff get trained, and it is not a lecture

Short, regular, and about the things that actually happen in offices like yours. A fake invoice. A message from the boss asking someone to buy gift cards. A login page that looks right until you check the address.

Nobody is ever in trouble for asking us about an email. We would rather answer twenty questions than clean up one incident.

Where the honesty is

There is no team in a room watching your screens overnight. What runs overnight is software, and when it sees something it raises an alert that reaches a person.

Some providers describe that as managed detection, or a security operations centre. We do not, because we do not have one. You should know what you are buying before something happens, not after.

If something does happen

Call 816-800-9867 and press 1. If you clicked something, or typed a password somewhere you should not have, say so straight away. Speed matters more than embarrassment, and nobody is in trouble.