Atlanta has seen what an attack costs
Few cities have had cybercrime hit as close to home. In March 2018, SamSam ransomware took down many of the City of Atlanta's own systems, knocking out online bill payments and court services for days and costing millions to recover from. In January 2024, a cyberattack on Fulton County disrupted court, tax and phone systems for weeks. Those were large public bodies with full IT departments. Small and midsize firms get hit too. They just rarely make the news.
Georgia ranked tenth among states for internet crime complaints in the FBI's 2025 report: 25,936 of them, carrying roughly $534.6 million in reported losses. Across the country, business email compromise, where a criminal poses as a vendor, client or executive to redirect a payment, cost victims nationwide just over $3 billion in 2025, by the FBI's count. Most of those schemes start with one convincing email.
Who gets targeted here
- Law firms and closing attorneys: Georgia real estate closings are run by attorneys, and wire instructions for closings are a favorite target. A spoofed email with new bank details can cost a client their down payment.
- Medical and behavioral health practices: patient records sell well and are covered by HIPAA. Midtown and the area around Emory University Hospital Midtown have hundreds of independent practices.
- Nonprofits: donor lists, payment data and staff who are trusting by nature. Fake invoices and gift card requests that appear to come from the executive director are common.
- Startups and software firms: source code, cloud admin accounts and customer data. Enterprise customers increasingly send long security questionnaires before they sign.
- Hotels, venues and event firms: card payments, shared front-desk computers and guest Wi-Fi all need to be kept apart from each other.
The protection we put in place for cybersecurity Atlanta businesses can live with
- A second sign-in step for mail, VPN, bank logins and admin accounts, using an authenticator app or hardware key rather than texted codes where we can.
- Inbox screening that rewrites and checks links, quarantines look-alike sender domains and strips dangerous files, with a report button right in Outlook.
- EDR agents on each computer and server. They flag behavior such as hundreds of files changing at once or a login from an odd place, and can quarantine the machine in seconds.
- Analysts on the alerts: a warning that fires at 2 a.m. is triaged that night by a person.
- Patching of operating systems, browsers and common business apps, with any exceptions written down.
- Tight admin rights and clean accounts: leavers shut off on their last day, admin rights held by as few people as practical, and a business password vault replacing the passwords spreadsheet.
- Network separation so guest Wi-Fi, building systems, cameras and conference room gear can't reach file shares or finance systems.
- Short, regular training with realistic test phishing emails, so staff get practice spotting the fake ones.
Shared buildings, shared risks
High-rise offices bring a few specific issues. Lobby and amenity Wi-Fi is shared with every tenant and visitor. Conference rooms booked through the building may have screens and video bars that nobody patches. Co-working floors in Midtown and Downtown put your staff on networks you don't manage. We treat any network you don't own as untrusted, use encrypted connections and device firewalls by default, and keep company data off personal devices unless they are enrolled and protected.
When something does go wrong
Say an attacker gets into a partner's inbox, or malware lands on a workstation. We cut off the account or device, trace what it touched, rotate credentials and bring back clean copies. Then we help you work out whether clients, patients, your insurer or your bank need to be told, and help you document what happened. A written incident plan, agreed on before anything happens, makes those first hours calmer and faster.
Insurance questionnaires and compliance
Carriers now send pages of questions at renewal time: is MFA everywhere, which EDR tool, are backups offline, how often is training run. We fill in the technical answers truthfully and close the holes before an underwriter or claims adjuster finds them. Practices covered by HIPAA get the Security Rule's technical safeguards configured and written up for their risk analysis. For startups, we help gather the evidence an enterprise customer's security review will ask for.
Where to begin
Our review digs into tenant settings in Microsoft 365 or Google, the last few months of sign-ins, device protection, firewall rules, backups and admin accounts. The write-up is brief and sorted by danger. Turning on MFA for all users and disabling legacy authentication tend to be done within ten business days.
Questions about cybersecurity
Would criminals bother with a 12-person office?
They do. Much of it is automated, and the rest is aimed at whoever approves payments, regardless of company size. Small firms are often easier to fool and slower to notice, which is exactly why criminals go after them.
Our insurer sent a security questionnaire. Can you fill it out?
We complete the technical sections with you, honestly, and fix shortfalls like accounts without MFA or backups nobody has restored, since those can raise the rate or derail a claim.
