Six steps from stranger to payday.
Most breaches are not a single clever hack. They are a chain of small, ordinary gaps. Here is how the chain runs, and where each link breaks.
They look you up
Before touching anything, an attacker reads your website, your socials and public records: staff names, email formats, the tools you run.
None of this is hacking yet. It is homework, and it is free.
Know what you expose and trim it. An exposure review shows your business the way an attacker first sees it.
See your attack surfaceThe lure lands
A believable email arrives for one staff member: a password notice, an invoice, a message that looks like it is from the boss.
It only has to fool one person on one busy day.
Someone clicks
The link opens a page that looks like your login. A staff member types their password, and the attacker catches it.
Now they have a real account, not a guess.
They get in
The attacker signs in as your staff member and looks around quietly, reading email, files and whatever that account can reach.
To your systems, it looks like a normal login.
They spread
A weak check lets them step from that account into the admin area or a second system they were never meant to reach.
This is the step a test would have found first.
The payday
Data is copied out, a payment is redirected, or systems are locked for ransom. The quiet part is over.
This is the day most businesses first find out.
Every step above had a stop. You do not need all of them at once, you need to know which link in your chain is weakest.
Find my weakest linkThis is an illustrative chain, not a real incident. Real breaches vary, but the shape is usually this ordinary.
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