A single phishing email can cost your company hundreds of thousands in one afternoon. No malware. No sophisticated hacking. Just one employee, one click, and one wire transfer to the wrong account.
Cyber risk is a business risk that can halt revenue, disrupt operations, damage your reputation, and trigger legal and regulatory consequences. That was the message from our recent webinar, “Cybersecurity Doesn’t Have to Be Scary,” led by Travis Strong (Principal, Rea Information Services), Jeff Rapp (Principal and Director, Rea Information Services), and Steve Grossenbaugh (Business Development Manager, Rea Information Services).
Here’s what you need to know.
The Threat Is Real and Growing
Small and mid-sized organizations are now preferred targets. Fewer protections, smaller information technology (IT) teams, limited monitoring. They’re easier to breach and faster to ransom. Most attacks aren’t even targeted – they’re automated. If you’re vulnerable, you’re a target.
The numbers: Between 40 and 72 percent of small and mid-sized businesses experienced a cyberattack in the past year. 82 percent of ransomware attacks in 2021 hit companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. 95 percent of data breaches are tied to human error.
Cybercrime is projected to cost $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. If cybercrime were a country, it would rank third economically behind the United States and China.
How Attacks Actually Happen
- Business Email Compromise (BEC)
An attacker gains access to a legitimate email account inside your organization and uses it to redirect money.
An employee receives what looks like a legitimate email from Microsoft asking them to sign back in. They click, enter credentials on a fake page. The attacker now has the username, password, and active session token, which can bypass multi-factor authentication.
Inside the mailbox, the attacker creates hidden forwarding rules to monitor conversations, then impersonates that employee and sends updated payment instructions. Funds get wired to offshore accounts instead of the intended vendor.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars disappear with no malware, no firewall breach. And the consequences extend beyond immediate financial loss: explaining to clients why their payment never arrived, banking investigations, and losing hard-earned trust.
Controls that help: email authentication records like Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC). Advanced email security that rewrites links and sandboxes attachments. Alerts when new mailbox rules are created. A standing finance policy that no banking or payment changes are accepted over email without secondary verification.
Train the human firewall. Your employees are either your weakest link or your strongest defense.
2. Ransomware Plus Data Theft
Today’s ransomware is worse than “pay us to unlock your files.”
Attackers get in with stolen or weak credentials. They move quietly, escalate access, and copy your confidential data. Then they deploy ransomware to shut down operations.
The double threat: pay to get back online, and pay again or we’ll leak your data publicly. Meanwhile, production stops. You can’t access payroll. Clients can’t place orders. Employees sit idle. If customer data was stolen, you face regulatory notifications, lawsuits, and reputation damage.
Controls that matter: multi-factor authentication on all remote access, eliminating admin rights from day-to-day accounts, endpoint protection on every device, 24/7 monitoring for unusual logins or mass file movement, regular patching and vulnerability management, and tested offsite backups.
Disaster recovery isn’t optional. You need a fallback position for when, not if, something happens.
When Compliance and Cybersecurity Intersect
Cybersecurity pressure isn’t just coming from attackers. It comes from regulators, clients, and state agencies.
Most compliance frameworks require the same three things: protect the data, protect the customer, and prove you’re doing it.
You don’t need 12 different security programs for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), Payment Card Industry (PCI), Service Organization Control (SOC), or Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requirements. You need one well-run program that maps to all of them.
If you receive state funds or you’re a government entity in Ohio, House Bill 96 raises the bar on required controls. You will be audited.
Defense in Depth: How Real Security Actually Works
No single tool makes you secure. The panelists compared effective cybersecurity to defending a castle. It’s layered.
- Identity and access security is the first layer. Multi-factor authentication, strong passwords, least privilege access, and conditional access policies will help to control who gets in and what they can touch. This eliminates huge amounts of risk before incidents occur.
- Network security is your perimeter. Firewalls, segmentation, and virtual private networks (VPN) act like moats, walls, and drawbridges, keeping attackers out and limiting their movement if they breach the perimeter.
- Endpoint security treats every laptop and server like its own guard post. Modern endpoint detection and response tools identify and contain threats at the device level. If one device is compromised, you detect it and isolate it immediately.
- Data security protects your important data. Encryption, access controls, data loss prevention, and backups ensure that even if attackers get in, stolen data remains useless.
- Application security reinforces your software and web applications. Secure coding practices, regular patching, and web application firewalls block vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them.
- Physical security protects your infrastructure. Badge systems, surveillance, locked server rooms, and visitor management ensure physical access is controlled.
- Disaster recovery and continuity planning provide your fallback position. Offsite backups and documented recovery plans mean you know exactly how fast you can be back in business when systems go down.
- Security governance and accountability tie everything together. Leadership needs visibility through policies, ownership, reporting, and proof. Without transparency, business owners and executives can’t know whether their IT team is adequately protecting the business.
- Third-party and cloud security extends protection beyond your walls. Assess vendor security, manage their access, and ensure the same standards you apply internally also apply to your partners and cloud providers.
- Security monitoring and incident response provides continuous oversight. Real-time monitoring, logging, threat detection, and documented incident response plans allow you to detect and contain threats before they become business disruptions.
When these layers work together, you have a comprehensive security program. True security comes from layered defenses preventing, detecting, and responding to threats at every level.
Where to Start
If you don’t have a full IT or security team, start with the highest-impact controls.
- Turn on multi-factor authentication everywhere: email, virtual private network (VPN), finance systems, remote access. This single step blocks most credential-based attacks.
- Train your people to spot phishing, report suspicious emails, and slow down before approving money movement.
- Ensure you have tested offsite or offline backups. Untested backups are expensive paperweights.
- Document your incident response plan. Who do you call when something happens? How do you communicate with clients? How do you operate while systems are down?
You don’t have to be Fort Knox. You just can’t leave the door unlocked.
Your Next Step
During the webinar, our team shared a cybersecurity protection checklist for leadership to review with IT teams or outsourced providers. Anywhere you answer no, that’s a gap. Build a plan, assign an owner, and budget for it.
Cybersecurity doesn’t have to be scary. It just has to be owned.
Need help walking through the checklist or pressure-testing your current controls against real-world attacks? Contact our Information Services team. We build practical, layered defenses that fit how you operate.
