Why Richmond businesses are targeted
Richmond’s economy is built on trade. Freight forwarders, customs brokers, importers, distributors and wholesalers near YVR and along the river move goods and money across borders every day. Professional firms and clinics along No. 3 Road and in Aberdeen and Lansdowne handle financial and personal information. That makes the city an attractive place for criminals, who look for exactly two things: money in motion and valuable data.
The attacks we see are rarely dramatic. They are quiet and patient. A criminal phishes one employee’s mailbox, reads the email for a few weeks, learns how invoices are approved, then sends a perfectly timed message asking for a payment to “new” bank details. Or a single unpatched laptop lets ransomware in on a Friday night, and on Monday the shipment records and the accounting files are encrypted.
Our cybersecurity services are designed around those realities, not around a generic checklist.
Stopping payment fraud first
For most Richmond importers and distributors, business email compromise is the biggest single financial risk. The losses can be large and are rarely recovered. We focus on the controls that actually prevent it:
- Multi-factor authentication on every mailbox and cloud app, including shared and service accounts that are often forgotten.
- Email authentication (SPF, DKIM and DMARC) on your domain, so criminals can’t easily send mail that appears to come from you to your customers.
- Impersonation and lookalike-domain protection, which flags messages from domains that are one letter off from a supplier’s.
- Alerts for risky sign-ins and new forwarding rules, the two classic signs a mailbox has been taken over.
- A simple, written payment rule: any change to supplier bank details is confirmed by phone, using a number you already had, before anyone pays.
Protecting devices, data and the warehouse network
Beyond email, we put layered protection on everything else:
- Endpoint detection and response (EDR) on every computer, watching for ransomware behaviour rather than only known viruses.
- Automated patching of Windows, macOS and common applications, so known holes are closed quickly.
- A properly configured firewall with the warehouse, office, cameras and guest Wi-Fi separated, so a compromised scanner or camera can’t reach the accounting PC.
- Backups kept separate from your network, so ransomware can’t encrypt your way out of recovery. See our Richmond backup and disaster recovery service.
Training people who work across languages and time zones
Many Richmond teams work in more than one language and coordinate with suppliers overseas, sometimes early in the morning or late at night. Phishing that arrives at 5 a.m. in a hurried tone is harder to spot. Our short, practical training uses realistic examples, including messages in the style of shipping notices, customs requests and supplier invoices, with regular refresher courses so the habits stick.
Compliance and client questionnaires
Larger customers and logistics partners increasingly send security questionnaires before they’ll work with you. We help Richmond businesses answer them honestly and close the gaps they reveal, and we align your safeguards with Canadian privacy law, including BC’s Personal Information Protection Act.
Getting started
Book a free security review. We’ll look at your email, devices, network and backups, explain what we find without jargon, and give you a prioritised plan with clear costs. Many Richmond clients start with an assessment and move to ongoing protection as part of managed IT support. For everything else we do locally, see IT support in Richmond.
