goleadingit.com

Cushman & Wakefield is a $10.3 billion real estate company headquartered right here in Chicago.

Last week, hackers stole the data of 310,000 people from their systems.

How'd they get in?

Someone called an employee and pretended to be IT support.

That's it.

No malware.

No sophisticated hack.

A phone call.

The attack is called "vishing", voice phishing, and it's the same method that has hit over 100 major companies since the start of 2026.

The hacker group ShinyHunters called, convinced the employee to hand over login credentials, and walked straight into the company's systems.

When Cushman & Wakefield refused to pay the ransom, the stolen data was dumped publicly.

This is happening right in our backyard.

And if a $10 billion company with a full security team can fall for a phone call, any business can.

The uncomfortable truth is that most businesses train their teams to spot suspicious emails but never mention suspicious phone calls.

Your employees don't expect an attack to come through the phone.

🔑 Train your team to verify any caller claiming to be IT support, hang up and call back on a known number

📞 Establish a verification code word for sensitive requests made by phone

✅ Never give login credentials or MFA codes to someone who calls you, no matter how legitimate they sound

The most dangerous call your business gets this year might not be a sales pitch.

It might be a hacker.

A lot of IT jobs offer you a desk and a ticket queue.

We offer something different.

LeadingIT is hiring engineers and technicians in Chicago, and we put together a package that's actually worth talking about:

✅ 5% 401k match

✅ Paid certifications so your skills keep growing on our dime

✅ Full health insurance

✅ Open door PTO policy

We're growing because Chicagoland businesses keep trusting us with their technology.

That growth means opportunity for the people who join us, and we back that up with benefits that reflect it.

If you're good at what you do and want to work somewhere that recognizes it, apply now 👇

goleadingit.com/careers

Most businesses treat cloud migration as a tech project.

The security team finds out after the cutover.

That's backwards, and it's one of the main reasons cloud breaches are among the most expensive kind.

According to IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average breach hit $4.88 million, and cloud environment breaches consistently rank at the top of that list.

The 5 R's framework (Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, Repurchase, Retire) gives you a structured way to categorize every application before you move it.

The security decisions that come with each path are where most SMBs cut corners, and where most post-migration incidents start.

Rehosting moves your existing misconfigurations right along with your workloads.

Refactoring introduces new attack surfaces if IAM isn't built in from the start.

And retiring a system without a formal data disposition plan is its own kind of breach waiting to happen.

We wrote a full breakdown of every migration path and the specific security risks that come with each one.

If you're planning a migration in the next 12 months, read this before you move the first workload 👇

🔗 https://goleadingit.com/blog/the-5-rs-of-cloud-migration-security-considerations-for-smbs/