A Houston real estate brokerage with 45 agents experienced a ransomware attack on a Wednesday afternoon. By end of business Wednesday, the attack was contained. By Thursday morning, all systems were fully operational. Zero ransom paid. This is how Datto backup and SpaceTown IT incident response made it possible. The Ransomware Attack A phishing email … Read more
A Houston nonprofit providing workforce development services received a $2.1 million federal grant that included a cybersecurity requirement: the nonprofit must maintain a documented information security program meeting NIST Cybersecurity Framework requirements. With 30 days to demonstrate compliance or return the grant funds, the nonprofit contacted SpaceTown IT. The Grant Requirement Federal grants increasingly include … Read more
A League City restaurant group operating eight locations across the Houston area failed their annual PCI DSS compliance self-assessment because their point-of-sale (POS) systems were on the same network as their guest WiFi and management systems. Their payment processor threatened to increase their transaction fees by 40% if compliance was not demonstrated within 90 days. … Read more
A Houston CPA firm with 28 staff serving 400 business clients received notification from their professional liability insurer that their cyber coverage would not renew without documentation of GLBA Safeguards Rule compliance — specifically a Written Information Security Program (WISP) and deployed MFA. SpaceTown IT completed the compliance project in six weeks. The Compliance Gap … Read more
A Cypress manufacturing company with 85 employees had experienced a near-miss cyber incident where an attacker who compromised one workstation was blocked from reaching the company’s ERP and financial systems only by luck — the firewall rule that should have allowed access was misconfigured. That near-miss prompted a full zero trust architecture implementation. The Problem … Read more
A Pearland construction company with $28 million in annual revenue nearly wired $280,000 to an attacker masquerading as a subcontractor. The fraud was caught — but only barely. What followed was a complete overhaul of their email security and payment verification procedures. How the Attack Almost Worked The attacker had compromised the actual email account … Read more
A Woodlands-based energy company with 340 employees operated an on-site employee health clinic — making the company a HIPAA-covered entity. An OCR compliance review letter arrived with a 60-day response deadline. SpaceTown IT executed a rapid HIPAA compliance implementation that satisfied the OCR review. The HIPAA Exposure The company’s employee health clinic had operated for … Read more
A Sugar Land law firm with 24 attorneys and 35 staff had been managing IT reactively for eight years — calling a break-fix vendor when things broke, buying hardware when equipment failed. After a server failure cost them three days of productivity and $40,000 in emergency recovery costs, they made the switch to SpaceTown IT … Read more
A Houston dental service organization (DSO) operating six locations across the Houston metro area had been running a legacy on-premise Exchange server for email and a peer-to-peer file sharing setup. When the Exchange server approached end-of-life, the DSO made the decision to migrate to Microsoft 365 — and engaged SpaceTown IT to manage the transition. … Read more
When ransomware hit a Katy, Texas medical practice on a Friday evening, the practice manager’s first call was to SpaceTown IT. By Monday morning, the practice was fully operational with zero data loss. This is the story of how proper IT preparation turned a potentially business-ending event into a weekend inconvenience. The Incident A Katy … Read more