Message from General Computer Development 

Out of Office Doesn’t Mean Out of the Woods

Summer is finally here — and for millions of small business owners and their teams, that means well-earned vacations, long weekends, and a slower pace at the office. Unfortunately, cybercriminals know that too. While you’re relaxing on the beach or waiting at a gate in a busy airport, attackers are quietly watching for the opening that summer creates.

Distracted employees, skeleton crews keeping the lights on, remote work from hotel lobbies and coffee shops, and rushed decisions on email all add up to a prime attack window. Here’s what you need to know — and what to do about it.

Why Summer Is Prime Time for Cyberattacks

• Public Wi-Fi & Rogue Access Points: Hotel, airport, and café Wi-Fi networks are hunting grounds for attackers who set up lookalike networks to harvest credentials and session tokens from unsuspecting travelers.
• Oversharing OOO Messages: Out-of-office auto-replies that include travel dates, destinations, or personal details hand attackers intelligence they can use to impersonate you or time their strike perfectly.
• Phishing Spikes: Social engineering attacks increase during vacation periods because people are less alert, checking email less frequently, and more likely to act on an “urgent” message without thinking it through.
• Business Email Compromise (BEC): When leadership is away, approval cycles get compressed. Attackers exploit this by impersonating executives to push through fraudulent wire transfers or vendor payment changes while the usual safeguards are off.

Travel Smart: Your Summer Security Checklist

1. Use a VPN on any public or hotel Wi-Fi. Your mobile hotspot is almost always safer than “Free_Airport_WiFi.” If you must use a shared network, make sure your VPN is on before you do anything business-related.
2. Lock your devices every time you step away — even just for a few minutes. It takes seconds for someone to access an unattended, unlocked laptop or phone at a busy airport or hotel lobby.
3. Keep OOO messages minimal externally. No travel dates. No destinations. No personal details. A clean, simple reply with a backup contact name and email is all you need — and all you should share.
4. Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) before you leave. Every email account, banking portal, cloud app, and business system should have MFA turned on. If it’s not set up yet, do it this week.
5. Delay sensitive transactions until you’re back. Payroll runs, vendor banking changes, and wire transfers should wait until you’re on a trusted, secure network. If something truly can’t wait, use a dedicated verification call to confirm the request is legitimate.
6. Brief your team before you go. Let them know what to do — and who to call — if they receive an unusual or urgent financial request from your email address while you’re away. One heads-up conversation can prevent a costly mistake.

Halfway There: Your July Cybersecurity Tune-Up

You set goals in January. You’ve worked hard. Now it’s July — the perfect time to check in on your business’s cyber health before the second half of the year picks up steam. Think of this as your mid-year wellness checkup, just for your IT security.

Go through each item below. If you can check it confidently, great! If not, that’s your action item for this month.

• ✅ Patch & Update Review
  Are all operating systems, applications, and cloud services fully up to date? The majority of successful cyberattacks exploit vulnerabilities that are older than six months — vulnerabilities that already have patches available. If updates have been waiting, now’s the time.
• ✅ Password & MFA Audit
  Are your team members using strong, unique passwords on every business system? Is Multi-Factor Authentication enabled across the board — especially on email, cloud storage, and financial accounts? Reused passwords are a skeleton key for attackers.
• ✅ Access Review
  Does anyone who no longer works for you still have active logins? Have you applied the principle of least privilege — ensuring every employee can access only what their current role requires? Former employee accounts and over-permissioned access are among the most overlooked vulnerabilities in small businesses.
• ✅ Backup Verification
  When did you last test your backups? A backup you’ve never tested is a backup you can’t count on. Apply the 3-2-1 rule: keep 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media types, with 1 stored offsite or in the cloud. Then actually verify you can restore from it.
• ✅ Employee Awareness
  When did your team last receive phishing awareness training? Summer is a high-click season for social engineering — people are distracted, relaxed, and more likely to click before they think. A quick refresher can dramatically reduce your risk.
• ✅ Incident Response Check
  Do you have a written plan for what happens if something goes wrong? Not a mental plan — a written one. Who do you call first? What systems do you isolate? Who communicates with clients? If you can’t answer those questions quickly, you need a plan.

5 Things You Can Do This Week to Strengthen Your Security

No big projects. No complicated rollouts. Just five focused actions that can meaningfully improve your security posture right now. Pick one, or do all five — your business will thank you.

A Final Note...