goleadingit.com

06/02/2026

A few weeks ago, hackers shut down Canvas, the learning platform used by 41% of American colleges, right in the middle of finals week.

Students across the country opened their laptops to study and found a ransom note where their login page used to be.

Professors couldn't access grades.

Assignments disappeared.

Schools scrambled to extend deadlines and rearrange entire exam schedules.

The hackers, a group called ShinyHunters, claimed they stole 3.65 terabytes of data from 275 million students, teachers, and staff across nearly 9,000 schools worldwide.

Names, email addresses, student IDs, and billions of private messages between students and teachers.

On Monday night, Instructure, the company behind Canvas, confirmed they paid the ransom.

Congress is now investigating.

This is the largest educational data breach in history.

And it happened because the attackers exploited a vulnerability in Canvas's free teacher accounts.

One overlooked entry point.

275 million people affected.

For Chicago business owners, this is a lesson in how a single weak spot can bring down an entire organization.

It doesn't matter how big you are or how much you spend on security if there's a door you forgot to lock.

🔒 Audit every access point to your systems, including free accounts, trial accounts, and old logins

🔑 Remove access for any accounts that aren't actively being used

✅ Have an incident response plan before you need one, not after

If a platform serving 9,000 schools can go down from one overlooked account type, what's the overlooked entry point in your business?

06/02/2026

🏁 GO FAST. DON'T DIE.

This describes exactly who succeeds here.

We're not looking for someone who needs perfect conditions before taking action.

We're looking for someone who sees an opportunity and goes.

Someone who would rather be in front of customers than sitting in internal meetings.

Someone who wants to build something.

If your favorite part of sales is the hunt, the conversation, the challenge, and the win...

You might be exactly who we're looking for.

LeadingIT is hiring a Director of Business Development to help us continue our growth across Chicagoland.

No corporate red tape.
No endless approval chains.
No waiting around.

Just opportunities, support, and the freedom to perform.

Ready to hit the gas?

Apply today! https://goleadingit.com/careers/

06/01/2026

This is what the LeadingIT tech team actually looks like:

People who are focused, genuinely good at what they do, and enjoy working together.

We're hiring engineers and technicians to join a team that supports Chicagoland businesses every day.

Real problems, real clients, real work that matters.

If you're the kind of person who gets satisfaction from figuring something out and handing it back to a client fully resolved, this is the right environment.

We're not a faceless corporation.

You'll know the people you work with and you'll see the impact of what you do.

👉 Apply at goleadingit.com/careers

Tag someone on your team who should make the jump.

05/29/2026

Most Chicago business owners didn't start their company to spend their days worrying about ransomware, compliance deadlines, and whether their backups actually work.

But that's where a lot of them end up.

When your IT is managed by the right partner, that mental load goes somewhere else.

Not to a help desk ticket you're waiting on.

Not to a vendor you can't reach.

Somewhere it actually gets handled, quietly, before it ever reaches your inbox.

That's the whole idea behind what we do at LeadingIT.

Your goals stay front and center.

The technology fears?

Those are ours to carry.

Learn more at goleadingit.com

05/28/2026

Congratulations to our very own Tina Congine on earning her Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute!

The PMP is one of the most respected credentials in the world, and it's not easy to get.

It requires proven experience leading projects, 35 hours of formal project management education, and demonstrates the ability to manage people, processes, and business priorities across any industry.

Tina put in the work and earned it.

This is a reflection of what we already know about Tina, she's sharp, she's thorough, and she gets things across the finish line.

Having that recognized at the highest level of the profession is well deserved.

Tina, the whole LeadingIT team is proud of you.

Now let's get back to work. 🎉

05/27/2026

Security vendors throw around "pen test," "VAPT," and "SOC" like they mean the same thing.

They don't, and choosing the wrong one doesn't just waste your budget, it leaves real exposures undetected while giving you confidence that nothing's wrong.

Here's the short version of what each one actually does.

A pen test actively tries to break into specific systems.

A VAPT first maps everything that's exposed, then proves what an attacker could do with the worst findings.

A managed SOC watches your network around the clock for threats that are happening right now.

Three different questions.

Three different answers.

The average cost of a data breach hit $4.44 million globally in 2025 according to IBM. For a 50-person business, even a fraction of that number is enough to trigger fines, lose clients, and start a conversation about whether the doors stay open.

We broke down exactly which service fits which situation, including a decision framework you can work through right now to figure out where your business should start 👇

🔗 https://goleadingit.com/blog/vapt-vs-soc-vs-pen-testing/

In this article: Security vendors treat “VAPT,” “SOC,” and “pen test” as interchangeable. They are not. Each service answers a different question, operates on a different timeline, and addresses a different layer of risk. Choosing the wrong one does not just waste budget; it creates a fa...

05/26/2026

On May 11, Google confirmed something the cybersecurity world has been dreading:

Criminals used AI to build a weapon that's never been seen before.

Google's Threat Intelligence Group announced on Monday that they discovered the first known case of hackers using an AI model to find a hidden security flaw and turn it into a working attack tool.

The flaw bypassed two-factor authentication, the extra login step most businesses rely on to keep accounts safe.

The criminals planned to use it in a mass attack hitting as many targets as possible at once.

Google caught it in time and worked with the software company to patch the hole before it could be used.

But here's the part that should concern every business owner:

The exploit looked like it was written by a textbook, not a human.

Clean code, detailed notes, even a fake security score.

The AI did the work a team of skilled hackers would have done.

Google's chief analyst called it "a taste of what's to come" and "the tip of the iceberg."

He said for every AI-built attack they can trace, there are probably many more already out there.

For Chicagoland businesses, the math just changed.

Attacks that used to require expensive, highly skilled teams can now be built by anyone with access to the right AI tools.

🛡️ Make sure your systems are patched and updated consistently, AI finds the flaws you haven't fixed yet

🔒 Don't rely on basic two-factor authentication alone, ask your IT provider about phishing-resistant options

⚡ Work with a security partner who monitors threats in real time, not one who checks in once a month

The age of AI-built cyberattacks isn't a warning about the future.

It started just a couple weeks ago...

05/25/2026

This Monday we pause, and mean it.

Memorial Day isn't a long weekend to us.

It's a reminder that the freedom to build something, to run a business, to show up for our clients and our community, exists because someone else showed up first in a much harder way.

To everyone who has served and to the families who carry the weight of that sacrifice, thank you.

From all of us at LeadingIT, enjoy the time with the people who matter most.

05/22/2026

Breaches that go undetected for more than 200 days cost an average of $5.01 million to clean up.

Let that sink in for a second.

Most businesses don't find out they've been breached right away.

Attackers sit quietly inside networks for weeks, sometimes months, moving through systems and collecting data while everything looks completely normal on the surface.

Three things make expert cybersecurity non-negotiable for Chicago businesses right now:

🔍 The longer a breach goes undetected, the more it costs - and most go undetected for far too long

📋 Compliance fines can rival the cost of the breach itself, hitting you twice for the same incident

💰 The average US data breach hit an all-time high of $10.22 million in 2025

Your IT shouldn't just fix things after they break. It should make sure they don't break in the first place.

Want to know where your business stands?

Contact us.

goleadingit.com/contact-us/

05/21/2026

A lot of small businesses turned on two-factor authentication and called it a day.

Hackers figured that out.

Here's what the data actually shows in 2025:

🔓 59% of SMB breaches involved improper or missing MFA

🔓 33% of incident response cases involved MFA being actively abused

🔓 22% of breaches started with stolen passwords

🔓 16% started with phishing

The problem isn't that MFA doesn't work.

It's that the most common form of MFA, a six-digit code texted to your phone, can be captured by a fake login page in real time.

You enter the code, the phishing site grabs it, and they're logged in as you before you even notice something's off.

Turning on MFA is still the right call.

But for Chicago businesses handling sensitive data, the type of MFA matters just as much as having it at all.

Not sure if your setup is actually protecting you?

That's exactly what a security assessment tells you.

Want to strenghten your strategy: goleadingit.com/contact-us/

Sources: Sophos, Cisco Talos, Verizon DBIR, IBM