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Your salesperson stops at a coffee shop between meetings. They set up at a table, open their laptop, order a drink, and walk back to the counter when their name is called. The laptop is unattended for 90 seconds. That's enough time for someone to ruin your business week. The att

On May 19, 2026, Google Cloud's automated abuse-detection system incorrectly suspended Railway, one of its largest customers. The decision took Railway's entire platform offline for eight hours and pulled thousands of small businesses down with it. Railwa theregister.com/off-prem/2026/…

When an employee leaves your business, the security gap is usually bigger than you'd guess. A typical 25-person business has dozens of cloud accounts per employee. Email, payroll, file storage, CRM, accounting, internal tools, and third-party SaaS subscriptions. When the emp

On May 7, 2026, an Amazon Web Services data center overheated and took out an entire availability zone in US-East-1, AWS's most popular region. Several core AWS services went down, and any business application hosted in that zone was unreachable for hours. itpro.com/infrastructure…

The quarterly review with your IT provider is one of the most useful meetings on your calendar, but it's easy to let it run on autopilot. Walk in with six real questions and you turn it from a status update into a strategic check-in. Six to ask at your next review: 1. What chan

In May 2026, hackers breached Instructure, the company behind the Canvas learning platform used by thousands of schools and universities. The attackers claimed data on 275 million users across more than 9,000 institutions. That breach didn't just affect I insidehighered.com/news/tech-inno…

The old rules about strong passwords are out of date.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

In May 2026, Intuit announced it would lay off around 3,000 employees to refocus the company on AI. Intuit owns QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma. Most small businesses use at least one of these. The layoffs are part of a bigger pattern ac techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/int…

Your office printer is probably the least secured device on your network. Default admin passwords are still in place. The hard drive inside it stores copies of every document scanned or printed in the last few months. Its web interface is exposed to anyone on the same network, a

You probably can't list every SaaS tool your business pays for, and that's the first problem. Your business probably runs dozens of SaaS subscriptions, and a lot of them were signed up for once and forgotten. Some are duplicates, some are still paid by people who left, and a few

Read the fine print… your Cyber Insurance Policy could be worthless. Many small business owners breathe easier once they've purchased cyber insurance. The assumption is simple: if ransomware strikes, the insurer will pay. But the reality is far more complicated. Increasingl

When the same person designs your IT systems and protects them, you've got a built-in conflict of interest. Even a great IT person can't reliably check their own work. Backups, firewall rules, access reviews, incident post-mortems: every one of those checks is done by the same p

In May 2026, Google launched a one-click tool that imports your team's Microsoft 365 user accounts directly into Google Workspace. The feature is built into the Workspace setup flow for very small and small businesses. It pulls user accounts from M365 in workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2026/05/small-…

Your primary work email is on every business card, contract, and website. It's also the first thing attackers look for when they're targeting your business. Phishing crews scrape your company website and LinkedIn for the format and patterns of your email addresses. Once they hav

A ransomware group called "The Gentlemen" is one of the fastest-growing names in cybercrime right now. You probably haven't heard of them. In April 2026, The Gentlemen accounted for roughly 10% of all logged ransomware attacks worldwide and climbed into t blog.checkpoint.com/research/cyber…

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 oper

Windows 10 hit end of life on October 14, 2025. Microsoft stopped sending free security updates that day. Every new vulnerability discovered since then sits unpatched on every Windows 10 machine that isn't enrolled in Microsoft's paid Extended Security Updates program. The list

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

In April 2026, ransomware hit Adaptavist, an Atlassian platinum partner that builds and supports tools for thousands of business customers. Adaptavist makes ScriptRunner and similar add-ons that plug into Atlassian products like Jira and Confluence. When theregister.com/2026/04/21/ada…

Your incident response plan needs to live on paper, because the second you need it, your computers and email are the thing that's broken. A one-page version beats nothing. The most important piece is the contact list, because those are the phone numbers you can't get to once you