Technology Advisor Blog

Protecting your business email doesn't have to mean giving up your privacy. Here's what modern email security actually looks at—and why even small businesses need to pay attention.

Most small accounting firms are doing everything right for their clients and not enough to protect them. The work is careful, the relationships are built on trust, and the data being handled every day (Social Security numbers, bank accounts, years of financial records) is exactly what cybercriminals are looking for.

Most people picture a cyberattack as something dramatic and obvious. For a small law firm in Greater Boston, the reality is that it usually starts with an email that feels routine and ends with an unexpected phone call.

If someone asked you right now how secure your business is, what would you say?

If something about your business technology feels wrong today, that instinct is worth taking seriously. Whether it is a computer behaving strangely, an employee flagging an unfamiliar login, or a client who received a suspicious email from your address, the worst possible response is to convince yourself it is probably nothing and wait.

How you respond in the first hour can significantly affect the outcome. Here is exactly what to do.

Imagine three small businesses facing the exact same cyber threat.

An attacker gets access to an employee’s email account. Maybe a password was stolen through phishing. Maybe the attacker found credentials from an earlier breach. However they got in, they now have something incredibly valuable: access to a real business email account.

From there, they can quietly watch.

They can learn who handles invoices. Who approves payments. Which vendors the company works with. How the owner communicates. They may even watch an existing email conversation and wait for exactly the right moment to step in.

This is Business Email Compromise, or BEC. And it’s one of the most financially damaging forms of cybercrime facing businesses today.

According to the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) Annual Report, Business Email Compromise was the second-highest crime type by reported financial losses, behind investment fraud. Businesses and individuals reported approximately $3.05 billion in BEC losses in 2025 from 24,768 complaints.  Read the full FBI report here.

That’s billion with a “B.”

But statistics don’t always make cyber risk feel real.

So let’s look at what happens when the same kind of threat hits three different businesses.

Not long ago, a scam email was easy to spot. Poor grammar, generic greetings, or suspicious links that looked nothing like the brand they were pretending to be. Most people learned to recognize them and felt reasonably confident in their ability to delete them before any damage was done, but that confidence is now a liability.

Phishing emails in 2026 are professionally written, visually convincing, and increasingly personalized. They reference your name, your company, your colleagues, and sometimes details about your business that feel like they could only come from someone who knows you. They arrive from addresses that look almost identical to the real thing, and create urgency that makes you want to act before you think.

 In a recent workshop hosted by Ekaru, Ann Westerheim and Linda joined Lincoln Vierhus to break down exactly how Business Email Compromise and phishing attacks work and why they are so effective against small businesses in greater Boston. You can watch the full workshop here. 

One of the clearest takeaways from that conversation was this: the emails that cause the most damage are not the obvious ones, but the ones that look completely legitimate right up until the moment they are not.

So how do you actually tell the difference?

Why Is My Computer So Slow? And What To Do About It

You sit down to start your day, open an application, and spend the next several minutes watching a progress bar that does not seem to be progressing. It is one of the most common frustrations in any workplace and for small businesses it is more than an inconvenience. Every minute your team spends waiting on a slow machine is a minute they are not serving clients, moving work forward, or doing what you are actually paying them to do.

The good news is that slow computers usually have a reason behind them, and most of those reasons are fixable. Here is what is actually going on and what you should do about it.

 Modern cybersecurity threats don't always begin with malware or a suspicious link. Sometimes they start with a conversation that seems completely legitimate. Here's what one recent social engineering assessment can teach small businesses about protecting themselves. 

When most people think about phishing attacks, they picture an email filled with spelling mistakes, suspicious links, and obvious red flags. 

Unfortunately, that's not how many modern attacks work.  "Don't click on a suspicious link" doesn't cut it anymore for security awareness training.

A recent social engineering assessment conducted by security researchers at NetSPI demonstrated just how sophisticated today's attackers have become. Instead of sending a traditional phishing email, the researchers spent time building trust before ever introducing a malicious link.

The scenario they created was simple - and highly believable. Too many people think they'll never fall for a

Summer is here and most small business owners are thinking about time off.