How an Attacker Sees Your Small Business Network (North Alabama Edition)

When I look at a small business network in North Alabama, I don’t see a bunch of boxes and wires—I see a set of decisions. Which vendor did you trust to plug things in? Who insisted on remote access because ‘we might need it after hours’? Which machines do you quietly hope never break because you’re not sure how they were set up in the first place? That decision layer is where attackers start, not at some abstract firewall diagram.

Most of the time, the first reconnaissance happens without touching your network at all. I start with your public presence: your domain, email records, what services are exposed to the internet, what cloud tools you mention on your careers page, and what your staff post on LinkedIn. From there I can usually tell whether you’re a ‘single-router-and-pray’ shop, a DIY VLAN tinkerer, or a more mature environment that still has soft spots at the edges.

Once I know your rough maturity, I zoom in on three things: remote access, identity, and backups. Remote access is anything that lets me get in from the outside—VPN portals, RDP, remote support tools, misconfigured firewalls, cloud admin panels. Identity is who can do what once I’m in—reused passwords, weak MFA, shared accounts, and over-permissive roles. Backups are my insurance policy: if your backups are exposed or untested, ransomware becomes much more attractive.

In places like Fort Payne, Huntsville, Chattanooga, or even out toward Nashville and Atlanta, there’s a pattern: businesses have grown faster than their IT stack. A manufacturer might have a surprisingly modern ERP system but still expose a remote desktop gateway to the internet because ‘that’s how the vendor set it up in 2016.’ A clinic might have cloud EHR but staff PCs that haven’t been rebuilt in a decade. Those seams—between old and new—are where attackers squeeze in.

From inside the network, the view shifts. I’m no longer thinking ‘How do I get in?’ I’m thinking ‘Whose machine will tell me the most about this environment?’ That’s usually a bookkeeper, office manager, or operations lead—someone who has access to invoices, banking, vendor portals, shipping platforms, or payroll tools. Their email is often a goldmine of passwords, onboarding instructions, and links to systems that don’t show up in any ‘IT inventory’.

The good news is that the way I see your network can be turned into a checklist you control instead of a mystery to be afraid of. Start by listing every way someone can connect from the outside: remote desktop, VPN, cloud admin panels, vendor portals. Then list who has broad access inside: accounting, payroll, HR, senior leadership, IT vendors. Finally, document how you’d recover if a key system went down tomorrow—not in theory, but in ‘which backup, how long, who does it’ detail.

If you’re in Fort Payne, Huntsville, or anywhere in the radius out to Chattanooga, Nashville, or Atlanta, you don’t need to turn your shop into a hardened military base overnight. But you do need to change how you think about your network: not as a diagram on a wall, but as a living set of decisions that attackers can read. A focused adversarial review can show you exactly where those decisions help you—and where they quietly expose you.

When I run an engagement with Ingress Labs, I don’t just hand you a list of vulnerabilities. I walk you through how your environment looks in those first few hours of reconnaissance, from the outside in. That perspective lets you prioritize fixes that matter in the real world, not just on a scanner report. If you want that kind of visibility for your business, even if you’re ‘just’ a local operation, you’re exactly the kind of client this work is designed for.

If you’re in Fort Payne, Huntsville, Chattanooga, Nashville, or Atlanta and want that kind of outside-in view of your environment, start with a short briefing request on the contact page or review the service-area pages for Fort Payne, Huntsville, Chattanooga, Nashville, or Atlanta.