Local Cybersecurity in Fort Payne & DeKalb County: Where Small Businesses Should Start

In Fort Payne and across DeKalb County, most business owners wear at least three hats. You’re running operations, dealing with staff, and trying to keep customers happy. Cybersecurity often shows up as one more vague thing you’re told to care about—and usually only after someone you know has a scare with ransomware or email fraud. The truth is that you don’t need a full-time security team to meaningfully reduce your risk. You just need a realistic starting point.

The first step is accepting that ‘we’re small’ is not a shield. Attackers don’t wake up targeting specific ZIP codes; they target patterns. If your business runs Windows machines, uses email, takes card payments, or depends on a small handful of cloud tools, then from an attacker’s perspective you look a lot like thousands of other companies across Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. Automated scans and commodity phishing don’t care that you’re a local shop.

Practically, there are four areas to focus on: email, remote access, backups, and payments. Email because that’s where invoices, password resets, and staff instructions flow. Remote access because that’s how your IT vendor, accountant, or staff connect in from home. Backups because they decide whether ransomware is an inconvenience or an existential threat. Payments because a single cleverly forged invoice can move five or six figures out of your accounts before anyone notices.

Email hardening can start with something as simple as a good password manager and multi-factor authentication for key accounts. If you’re using Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, make sure the tenant itself is locked down—not just individual inboxes. Train staff on one specific behavior: if an email asks you to move money, change banking details, or share files in an unusual way, verify it using a different channel before acting.

For remote access, inventory every way someone can connect into your network or systems from the outside. That might include remote desktop gateways, VPNs, remote support tools, or cloud admin panels. Each one should have strong authentication and a clear owner. If you don’t know why something is exposed, that’s a problem. If your IT vendor set it up years ago and no one has revisited it, that’s an even bigger one.

Backups are your last line of defense. In DeKalb County and surrounding areas, I see a lot of businesses with ‘backups’ that are just copies of data sitting on the same network as everything else. If ransomware hits, those copies get encrypted too. You want at least one backup that is offline or logically separated—something that can’t be overwritten just because an attacker has access to your main network.

If this feels overwhelming, that’s exactly where a focused local engagement helps. Instead of generic advice, you get a short, intense review of how your specific business in Fort Payne or DeKalb County operates, where your real dependencies are, and how an attacker would chain those together. The outcome is a prioritized, owner-readable list of things to fix that actually match your reality.

Ingress Labs is based near here on purpose. Being local means we can sit down with you, see your environment in person when needed, and tailor recommendations to how your business truly runs—not how a template thinks it should. If you’re ready to move from ‘we hope we’re fine’ to ‘we know our biggest risks and are working them down,’ that’s a conversation worth having.

You can dive deeper into what local cybersecurity looks like here at home on the Fort Payne & DeKalb County service page at local cybersecurity for Fort Payne or skip straight to requesting a briefing via the contact page if you already know you need help.