"Almost nobody gets beaten by brilliance anymore. They get beaten on the fundamentals they quit checking." Josh Wilmoth, CTTS
If you bought a hunting or fishing license in Texas, you may want to check your credit this month.
In mid June, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department announced that the outside company handling its license sales had been breached, exposing driver's license numbers, passport numbers, and contact details for more than 3 million hunters and anglers. The state's own systems were fine. Texas did not get hacked in the way most people picture it. A vendor that most of those three million people had never heard of was the soft spot. And here is the part that stings: unlike a password, those identifiers cannot be reset.
I know how a story like that lands when you run a business. You read the headline, you picture some hooded genius in a dark room running code you will never understand, and you quietly decide there was nothing you could have done anyway. That feeling is the most dangerous part of the whole thing, because it is wrong.
It's Not Just State Agencies
Here is what should get your attention. The same month, the exact same kind of attack hit the people who are supposed to be the best at this.
A breach at a market intelligence platform called Klue rippled outward and compromised nearly 200 organizations, including major cybersecurity vendors. Read that again. Security companies got burned through a trusted third party connection they had wired into their systems. Around the same time, a prediction market called Polymarket lost an estimated 3 million dollars after attackers slipped a malicious script onto its site through a breach at a third party vendor. Even Nintendo had employee data exposed through an outside survey tool, while its own gaming systems were never touched.
Different industries. Same story every time. Nobody kicked down the front door. They walked in through a door a vendor was already holding open.
The One Word Underneath All Of It
Sit with these stories long enough and they collapse into a single word. Fundamental.
None of this was sophisticated. A vendor connection nobody had reviewed in months. A payment nobody picked up the phone to verify. A login nobody slowed down to question. That is not master criminal work. That is a skipped step that someone got paid for.
The numbers back it up. The FBI's latest figures put business email compromise losses at 3.05 billion dollars in a single year, across nearly 25,000 reported complaints. For small and midsize businesses, that kind of fake invoice and vendor payment fraud now causes more loss than ransomware does. Those are not genius numbers. They are fundamentals numbers. They are the cost of everyone being a little too busy to confirm the obvious.
The attackers did not get smarter this summer. They just kept betting that the rest of us would stay distracted. So far, the bet keeps paying.
What Fundamental Actually Looks Like
Good news. If the problem is fundamentals, then the problem is fixable, because fundamentals are knowable. You do not have to outsmart a genius. You have to stop beating yourself. Here is what that looks like in a real business.
You verify money. Any email that asks you to send a payment, change bank details, or wire something urgently gets confirmed out loud, on a phone number you already had on file, before a dollar moves. Never the number in the email.
You know who has a key. You can name every outside vendor, app, and contractor that can reach into your systems right now, and you cut the access for the ones who no longer need it. Old logins are unlocked doors with nobody watching them.
You test the parachute before you jump. A backup you have never actually restored is a hope, not a plan. You confirm it works and you know how long getting back online would really take.
And you have a real conversation about all of this every quarter, not only when something is already on fire. The businesses that get blindsided are almost always the ones who only talk to their IT partner when the renewal comes up.
Three Questions Worth Asking Yourself This Week
If a longtime vendor emailed today asking you to update their bank account, who on your team would stop and verify it, and exactly how would they do it?
Could you list every outside company and app with a door into your systems right now, and when did anyone last review that list?
If your main system went down this afternoon, do you actually know how fast you could be back, or are you assuming?
If any of those three made you pause, that pause is the whole point.
How CTTS Helps
This is the work we do quietly in the background for the businesses we protect across Austin, Round Rock, Cedar Park, Georgetown, and San Marcos. We map who has access to your systems and close the doors that should not be open. We put verification steps around your money so a convincing email cannot move it. We test your backups so a bad day stays a bad day instead of becoming a closed business. And we sit down with you on a regular rhythm so the fundamentals get checked on purpose, not by accident after a breach.
You should not have to wait for your name to land in a headline to find out where you were exposed.
Most of you reading this are already clients, so here is my direct ask. If you and I have not walked through your vendor access list and your real backup recovery time together this quarter, let's put it on the calendar before the summer slips away. It takes one short conversation and it is the single best way to make sure none of the stories above ever has your name in it.
Not a client yet, and reading this over someone's shoulder? Same invitation. Let's take a look at what is hiding beneath the surface of your business before someone else finds it first.
Call us at (512) 388-5559 or visit www.CTTSonline.com to grab a time.
PS
I will admit something. The one summer I actually remembered to buy my fishing license early instead of in the truck on the way to the lake is the summer the license data gets breached. There is a lesson in there about doing the right thing at the right time, but mostly I am just impressed the universe waited until I was being responsible. If you got the Kroll credit monitoring letter too, welcome to the club. Our official summer hobby is now refreshing our credit reports. The bass were not biting anyway.
Contact CTTS today for IT support and managed services in Austin, TX. Let us handle your IT so you can focus on growing your business. Visit CTTSonline.com or call us at (512) 388-5559 to get started!