Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2026, for owners who are not the IT department
A short October list for Pittsburgh-area owners: the mailbox, the admin account, the backup, and a person who will pick up.
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. The posters are fine. The useful version is shorter, and it fits on a counter between customers.
Start with the mailbox. Almost every painful story we hear starts as an email that looked close enough. Turn on multi-factor authentication for every person, and a stricter rule for anyone who can pay a bill or change payroll. If a login can move money, a password alone is not a control.
Separate the everyday account from the admin account. The person who reads mail should not be one click away from deleting the whole company. Name two people who can administer Microsoft 365, and write down where that list lives.
Know where the backups are, and whether anyone has restored one. A green check mark on a backup job is not the same as a file you opened from that backup. If you cannot point to a test from this year, put one on the calendar.
Give the staff a way to report a weird message without a lecture. The sentence you want in the office is “send it to us before you click,” not “you should have known.” A two-minute habit beats an annual video nobody finishes.
Finally, name the human. If something looks wrong at 4 p.m. on a Friday, whose number is on the wall? If you do not have an IT person, that number can be a local team. Tritek Cloud’s help desk is a phone call, and the free assessment is how we look at the four items above without a sales deck.
Awareness month ends. The mailbox does not. If you do only one thing after reading this, turn on multi-factor authentication for email this week.