Hey there,
Welcome to the first issue of The Savvy CISO Weekly. Here's the deal, up front, no fine print: every Wednesday you get one email that makes your business harder to hack. Plain English, under five minutes, zero jargon, and zero "the sky is falling" nonsense. That's the whole product. If I ever waste your time, hit reply and yell at me.
Quick vocab: a "CISO" is a Chief Information Security Officer, the executive big companies pay six figures to lie awake worrying about this stuff. You can't afford one. That's fine. This newsletter is the next best thing, and it costs you an email address.
THIS WEEK: The five-minute security check
Most small businesses don't get taken down by a criminal mastermind in a hoodie. They get taken down by bots rattling thousands of digital doorknobs at once, looking for the one somebody forgot to lock.
So the first thing we published is exactly that, a way to check your own doors: The 5-Minute Security Checklist for Small Business. Five questions, about a minute each:
- Is multi-factor authentication on for your email?
- Are you using the same password in more than one place?
- Is your computer actually up to date, or are you a serial "remind me later" clicker?
- If your laptop died right now, would your business survive it?
- Can that contractor from two summers ago still log in?
If you only do one thing this week, do number one. Whoever controls your email can reset the password on basically everything else you own, and turning on MFA takes about three minutes. Cheapest insurance you'll ever buy.
QUICK TIPS
- Any email screaming "act within 24 hours or else" is almost certainly a scam. Real companies are not that dramatic.
- Before you pay an invoice with new bank details, confirm it by phone, on a number you already have, not the one in the email. This one move stops the scam that costs businesses billions a year.
- Turn on automatic updates on every computer in the office. One setting, and it slams the door attackers use most.
TOOL OF THE WEEK
Have I Been Pwned (haveibeenpwned.com) is a free site run by a well-respected security researcher. Type in your email and it shows you which data breaches your accounts have turned up in. Fair warning: there will be some. Everybody's got a few. That's normal, and next week we'll cover what to actually do about it.
If this was useful, forward it to one business owner who still runs the entire operation off a single laptop. You know exactly who. And if you haven't yet, grab the printable Small Business Security Quick-Check, the five checks above on one page you can run every quarter.
Stay secure,
Savvy CISO