The Most Dangerous Risks in Your Business Don’t Swim on the Surface

On the surface, the water looks calm. That’s exactly what makes Shark Week compelling every summer — the danger is never what you can see. It’s already moving underneath.

Cybercriminals work the same way. The threats facing Capital Region businesses right now are built to blend in with normal operations until the moment money moves or systems go down. And summer makes it easier: schedules shift, staff travel, and oversight gets thin. Attackers count on it. Here are three ways they’re circling.

1. Fake invoices and vendor impersonation

Attackers often don’t need to hack anything — they need to send one believable email. It’s called business email compromise (BEC), and it works by impersonating a vendor, supplier or executive your team already trusts. The message looks routine, someone pays the “vendor,” and by the time anyone realizes it wasn’t legitimate, the money is gone.

These scams spike during vacation season for one reason: when the person who normally approves payments is out, requests get rerouted to stand-ins who don’t always know what “normal” looks like — and who are less likely to push back on urgency.

The fix is simple: require verification on any financial request that arrives by email. A quick call to a known number — never the number printed in the email — stops most of these cold.

2. Phishing aimed at distracted employees

Phishing succeeds because it’s engineered around how people behave when they’re busy. A distracted employee sees a password-reset alert and clicks. A text arrives that looks like it’s from IT. An email lands right before a meeting demanding urgent approval on a transfer. Nobody pauses to verify, because pausing feels like losing time.

The strongest defense here isn’t a piece of software — it’s culture. Employees need to feel safe slowing down when something seems off:

• An unexpected login or verification request
• A payment instruction that came out of nowhere
• A link in an email they weren’t expecting

Speed is the weapon attackers use against you. Slowing down is how you take it away.

3. Third-party risk that travels fast

When a vendor with access to your systems gets compromised, the threat doesn’t stay with them — it travels straight into your environment through whatever connection they hold. This is supply-chain exposure, and most businesses have far more of it than they realize: connected software tools, providers holding credentials, and contractors whose access was never removed after a project wrapped.

Outsourcing a service doesn’t outsource the accountability. Knowing where you stand means being able to answer three questions:

• Which vendors can reach your data or systems?
• What exactly are they connected to?
• Who internally owns each of those relationships?

If those answers aren’t clear, your exposure is wider than you think.

By the time you see it, it’s already moving

Sharks don’t announce themselves, and neither do the criminals targeting your business. The companies that get hit usually aren’t the ones ignoring obvious red flags — they’re the ones assuming everything is fine because nothing looks wrong. Summer is when attention drifts and the water looks calmest. It’s also when attackers are busiest.

Northeast IS helps businesses across Albany, the Capital Region, Vermont and the Berkshires get a clear picture of where they’re exposed — across vendors, employee activity and day-to-day operations — before something goes wrong.