The FBI put out an alert this year about a crew that calls law firms pretending to be the IT department — and when the phone call doesn't work, they send someone to the office in person with a USB drive.
What I want to talk about isn't the attack. It's the Tuesday after.
Most owners picture downtime as a server sitting dark in a closet. It doesn't look like that. It looks like twenty people standing in a hallway. Nobody can open a file. Nobody can send mail. The front desk is taking messages on paper. Two partners spend the morning on the phone with a vendor instead of a client.
Do the arithmetic on your own firm. Twenty people, one lost day, eight hours each — that's 160 working hours gone. At a conservative $60 an hour fully loaded, you're out roughly $9,600 in payroll before you've lost a single billable hour, before the response invoice, before the first client asks why their closing slipped.
And these things rarely last one day. They last a week.
The fix isn't exotic. Know who is allowed to approve a remote-access request. Give your staff one number to call to verify one. And test that your backups actually restore, instead of assuming they will.
Worth walking through before your next cyber renewal.
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