What attacks on Forsyth County businesses look like
Cybersecurity in Forsyth County is mostly about ordinary-looking email. A supplier's "new bank details." A shared document link that asks you to sign in again. A text that seems to come from the owner asking for gift cards. These are the attacks that reach small offices, and they work because they look routine.
Georgians filed 25,936 reports with the FBI's IC3 in 2025 and said they lost close to $535 million, putting the state ninth in the country for losses. Across the U.S. that year, IC3 tallied 24,768 business email compromise reports tied to $3.05 billion, second only to investment scams by dollars. Fake closing attorneys and title agents, filed as real estate fraud, accounted for 12,368 more. In a county where new homes and commercial buildings close every week, that last one hits close to home for builders, agents and the attorneys who handle closings.
Why local industries are exposed
- Construction and trades pay subcontractors and suppliers large amounts on a regular schedule. A spoofed invoice from a lumber yard or concrete supplier is an easy way to divert one payment.
- Doctors and dentists keep health records that sell well on criminal markets and fall under HIPAA. A breach brings notification duties and, often, a visit from regulators.
- Professional firms keep tax returns, contracts, engineering drawings and client bank details in their mailboxes and file shares.
- Manufacturers run plant equipment on older Windows PCs. If ransomware reaches that network, production stops.
The layers we put in place
- Multifactor authentication on every email account, remote access tool and admin login, using phone prompts or security keys that staff find easy.
- Email protection that screens links, attachments and lookalike sender domains, and a report button in Outlook for anything that looks off.
- Endpoint detection and response on computers and servers. It looks for suspicious activity, like hundreds of files being renamed at once, and quarantines the device before the damage spreads.
- Human review of alerts, so warnings get acted on instead of piling up in a mailbox.
- Regular patch cycles, and a written list of anything we have to hold back and why.
- Tight accounts: admin rights only where they are needed, former staff removed promptly and a business password manager in place of spreadsheets and sticky notes.
- Network separation so guest Wi-Fi, security cameras and plant equipment sit apart from accounting and file storage.
- Staff training in short sessions, plus practice phishing emails that show who needs a refresher.
If something gets through
No setup is perfect. If an attacker gets into an inbox or malware lands on a desktop, we lock it down, work out what the attacker could reach, clean or rebuild affected systems and restore from protected backups. Then we help you decide who needs to hear about it: your bank, your cyber insurer, clients or patients. A short written incident plan, agreed in advance, saves hours of confusion on that day.
Insurance questionnaires and HIPAA
Cyber insurance renewals now come with long questionnaires. Is MFA on everywhere? Do you run endpoint detection? Can an attacker erase your backups? We help you answer truthfully and close gaps before the renewal date, because a wrong answer can put a future claim in doubt. For medical and dental practices, we put the technical safeguards of the HIPAA Security Rule in place and give you documentation for your risk analysis. Your practice still owns its policies; we make the technology match them.
How we begin
Our security review checks your tenant configuration, recent sign-ins, endpoint coverage, firewall rules, backups and every account with admin power. The findings come back as a brief, jargon-free list with the worst risks at the top. Turning on MFA, blocking old sign-in methods and fixing email authentication records are usually done in the first two weeks.
After that, the work is ongoing. We review alerts daily, check admin accounts and sign-in patterns each month and bring a security summary to every quarterly meeting. When a new scam starts circulating among Georgia contractors or a widely used app gets a serious flaw, we deal with it and let you know what we did.
Questions about cybersecurity
Is antivirus enough for a small office?
No. Antivirus catches known malware, but most losses now come from stolen logins and fake payment requests. MFA, email screening and endpoint detection close those gaps.
Will this slow my team down?
Very little when it's tuned properly. Staff tap an approval on their phone now and then, and most junk and phishing never reaches them.
