Rhinotech

This week’s security news for small businesses isn’t about sci-fi hacks—it’s about everyday email.

Experts say phishing and payment fraud are top concerns, and AI is making fake invoices and “urgent” vendor requests look more real. Ransomware crews are also targeting SMBs at scale.

Calm checklist for your team:
✅ Verify money/login requests by phone
✅ Turn on MFA (especially email)
✅ Test your backups
✅ Update Chrome & Windows this month

Questions about locking these down for your office? We’re happy to help—message us or visit rhinotech.io.

Read the full post: https://rhinotech.io/phishing-and-payment-fraud-calm-checklist/

Small businesses used to hear, “You’re too small for hackers to care.” That advice is out of date.

Recent reporting (mid-September 2026) shows attackers using automation—and AI-assisted playbooks—to hit many SMBs at once. It’s a volume strategy: same effort that once went after one big company can now target several smaller ones. You don’t need to be famous to be worth their time.

The good news is the defenses that matter most are still practical: multifactor authentication on email and admin accounts, timely patching (including website plugins), tested backups, and a simple incident plan your team can actually follow.

If you want a clear, no-pressure look at your setup, Rhinotech offers a free tech checkup for local businesses.

Read the full post: https://rhinotech.io/small-businesses-arent-too-small-anymore/

Microsoft just published a report on two active scams that are hitting businesses right now, and both are more convincing than the usual phishing attempt.

The first is a fake invoice scam. Attackers send emails that look like they are from your own CEO or president, asking your accounts payable team to pay an invoice, often disguised as a ServiceNow subscription renewal. What makes this one dangerous is the amount of effort behind it. The attackers register lookalike domains, pull real executive names and email addresses to make the signature look right, and even fake an entire email thread and invoice to make the request look like it has already been discussed and approved. Over a million of these emails went out in a single week in August, targeting companies across IT services, real estate, manufacturing, and other industries.

The second is a fake IT help desk scam aimed at breaking into cloud accounts. Attackers call or text an employee's personal phone, pretending to be internal IT, and tell them they need to urgently update their passkey, MFA, or single sign on setup or they will lose access. The link sent leads to a fake login page that either steals the employee's credentials or tricks them into approving the attacker's own login. Once in, the attacker quietly registers their own MFA method so they can keep coming back in, then spends hours or days going through SharePoint, OneDrive, and email pulling out sensitive files.

Neither of these relies on sloppy, obviously fake emails. They rely on employees trusting a familiar sounding request and moving quickly.

The best protection is a simple habit. Any request to pay an invoice or change your login and MFA setup should be verified through a separate, known channel before anyone acts on it. A phone call to a number you already have on file, not one provided in the message, is enough to stop both of these cold.

At Rhinotech, we help businesses in Easley, SC, Canton, GA, and surrounding areas stay ahead of these risks with reliable managed IT support, robust cybersecurity solutions, and expert guidance tailored to small and mid-sized organizations. Whether it’s implementing stronger defenses, conducting security assessments, or ensuring your systems are up to date, our team is here to protect what matters most to you.

Stay secure! Visit us at https://rhinotech.io to learn more about how we can support your technology needs.

Heads up, a dark web service called Nexus claimed to be selling over 153 million driver's license records from the US and Canada, plus millions of other ID documents and medical cards.

Security researcher Brian Krebs found his own license in the database, along with front, back, infrared and UV scans. He and other researchers traced the timestamps back to real world ID checks like car rentals and a dispensary visit, which pointed to identity verification company IDScan.net. That company has confirmed a security incident and says it's notifying affected customers.

The FBI is now looking into it, and the site itself has since gone offline. That doesn't mean the data is gone though, anyone who bought or downloaded it beforehand could still have copies.

If you've had your license scanned at a rental counter, dispensary, bar or similar business in the past year or two, it's worth taking a few precautions:

Freeze your credit with Equifax, Experian and TransUnion (it's free and doesn't hurt your score)
Check your credit reports for accounts you don't recognize
Turn on alerts for your bank and credit cards
Lock down your email and phone accounts with strong passwords and MFA
Be skeptical of callers who already know your personal details, that's not proof they're legitimate

At Rhinotech, we help businesses in Easley, SC, Canton, GA, and surrounding areas stay ahead of these risks with reliable managed IT support, robust cybersecurity solutions, and expert guidance tailored to small and mid-sized organizations. Whether it’s implementing stronger defenses, conducting security assessments, or ensuring your systems are up to date, our team is here to protect what matters most to you.

Stay secure! Visit us at https://rhinotech.io to learn more about how we can support your technology needs.

Microsoft is investigating an Exchange Online outage (tracked as EX1467029) causing delays for emails sent to and from external domains. It started around 2:19 AM EDT, with users hitting intermittent "Server busy" errors across multiple mailboxes. Microsoft says anti-spam protections may be making the delays worse for some users, but they haven't identified a root cause or given a fix timeline yet, just that they're still digging into telemetry.

No word yet on which regions or how many users are affected, though it's been flagged as an incident, which typically means real user impact.

This is just the latest in a string of Exchange Online problems this year, including mailbox access issues in April, mail flow delays in June, and a bigger outage with auth and connection failures just this past Thursday.

At Rhinotech, we help businesses in Easley, SC, Canton, GA, and surrounding areas stay ahead of these risks with reliable managed IT support, robust cybersecurity solutions, and expert guidance tailored to small and mid-sized organizations. Whether it’s implementing stronger defenses, conducting security assessments, or ensuring your systems are up to date, our team is here to protect what matters most to you.

Stay secure! Visit us at https://rhinotech.io to learn more about how we can support your technology needs.

SonicWall patched two SMA 1000 VPN vulnerabilities being actively exploited in the wild:

CVE-2026-83548 (CVSS 10.0): pre-auth SSRF in the Appliance Work Place interface, no login needed
CVE-2026-83549 (CVSS 7.8): post-auth OS command injection in the AMC, needs admin creds but leads to RCE

Looks like attackers are chaining both to get code ex*****on. Affects SMA 6210, 7210, and 8200v on 12.4.3-03453 and 12.5.0-02835 or older.

Fix: patch to 12.4.3-03526 or 12.5.0-02952. If IoCs turn up, re-image, rotate all passwords, and reset TOTP.

This is on top of another SMA 1000 zero-day pair (CVE-2026-15409/15410) patched last month that got used to drop KNUCKLEBALL malware. Second SMA 1000 zero-day round in about a month.

At Rhinotech, we help businesses in Easley, SC, Canton, GA, and surrounding areas stay ahead of these risks with reliable managed IT support, robust cybersecurity solutions, and expert guidance tailored to small and mid-sized organizations. Whether it’s implementing stronger defenses, conducting security assessments, or ensuring your systems are up to date, our team is here to protect what matters most to you.

Stay secure! Visit us at https://rhinotech.io to learn more about how we can support your technology needs.

At Rhinotech, we help businesses in Easley, SC, Canton, GA, and surrounding areas stay ahead of these risks with reliable managed IT support, robust cybersecurity solutions, and expert guidance tailored to small and mid-sized organizations. Whether it’s implementing stronger defenses, conducting security assessments, or ensuring your systems are up to date, our team is here to protect what matters most to you.

Stay secure! Visit us at https://rhinotech.io to learn more about how we can support your technology needs.