For Small and New Businesses

Your IT support and your external security review do completely different jobs.

Standard IT support answers one question: are your computers and network working? An external visibility review answers a different one entirely: what does your business look like to someone on the internet right now, and what can they do with what they see?

What standard IT support actually covers

A managed IT support provider is responsible for keeping your systems functional. That means workstations and servers running, user accounts provisioned, backups scheduled, and software updated. When something breaks, your IT provider fixes it. That is the job, and most providers do it well.

What that job description does not include is stepping outside your network perimeter and asking: what does our organization look like to a stranger with a scanner? That question requires a different vantage point entirely. Your IT provider is looking from the inside out. Attackers and automated scanners look from the outside in.

The gap between those two perspectives is where most small business exposures live.

The email spoofing problem: how it costs businesses real money

When you send an invoice to a client, that email carries authentication records published in your domain's public DNS configuration. These records (SPF and DMARC) are how receiving mail servers verify that the message actually came from you. If those records are missing, incomplete, or configured too permissively, anyone on the internet can send an email that appears to come from your exact corporate email domain. Missing or broken authentication records allow external attackers to impersonate your identity, intercept outbound invoices, and trick your clients into routing payments directly to fraudulent accounts.

The client's email software has no technical mechanism to flag it as fake. It arrives in their inbox with your name and your email address in the sender field, indistinguishable from a legitimate message.

Concrete example

Your business sends a $12,000 invoice to a client. A criminal who has been watching your domain sends a "follow-up" from your exact address two days later, explaining that your banking information recently changed and providing a new account number. The client pays. The funds transfer to the criminal. You pursue collection on the original invoice. The client insists they already paid.

This attack is called Business Email Compromise. It is the most financially damaging cybercrime category in the United States measured by total dollar loss, according to FBI reporting. Fixing the underlying DNS records costs nothing except a few minutes of your IT team's time. Being unaware of the gap costs everything.

When we review your domain, we pull your full DNS mail configuration and check three things: whether your SPF record exists and is scoped correctly to prevent third-party sending, whether your DKIM public key is published and valid, and whether your DMARC policy is published and set to actually enforce rather than just monitor. You receive the exact DNS text records your IT team needs to publish to close each gap.

What automated scanners see about your business right now

Automated network scanners run continuously against the full public internet. They catalog open ports, exposed service versions, SSL certificate expiration dates, and missing security headers for every domain and IP address they can reach. This data is collected, indexed, and made available in public databases that anyone can query without special access or technical skill.

When a threat actor looks for targets, they frequently start by querying these databases. They are not breaking into anything to gather this information. They are performing the same kind of lookup you would do to check a business's public profile.

What a typical query can surface

A remote desktop interface left open by a previous IT provider on a non-standard port. An admin panel for an old website CMS that was never taken offline after a redesign. A TLS certificate that expired seven months ago on your client portal. Staff email addresses tied to passwords that appeared in a third-party data breach two years ago. None of these require a sophisticated attacker. They require a search query and five minutes.

Why cyber insurance is directly connected to your external configuration

Cyber insurance underwriters run automated scans on your public domain as part of the underwriting process. If they find open management interfaces, expired certificates, or unenforced email authentication records, they treat those findings as evidence of your current security posture, not your intentions.

A business that does not know it has a broken DMARC record and a business that knows and has not gotten to it yet look identical to an automated scanner. The policy outcome is the same: a higher premium, a coverage exclusion, or a declination.

Fixing these issues before your renewal window is cheaper and faster than disputing findings during it.

Read the full insurance guide for a detailed explanation of how underwriters use passive scanning, what specific findings trigger which outcomes, and how a documented external review changes the conversation with your carrier.

Read the Cyber Insurance Guide