The Small Business Cyber Security Guy | Cybersecurity for SMB & Startups

Imagine someone who knows your director's calendar, your payroll provider, the IT stack listed in your job ad, and the name of the accountant who signs your invoices. They don't have to be a genius — they just read what you and the public have already told them. In this episode, Noel Bradford follows that clean, quiet path of reconnaissance from public registers to a phone call that sounds unmista...

They didn’t break in. They didn’t plant malware. They opened tabs, clicked links and joined the dots. In this episode we follow the quiet, methodical work of an attacker who builds a usable portrait of a UK small business director from nothing more than public records and a search box. It begins like a detective story and ends like a cautionary tale: Companies House entries, electoral data, Linked...

A firewall cannot save you from being badly run. For years, small businesses have been sold the idea that a perimeter box equals protection. When Fortinet disclosed exploited authentication bypass vulnerabilities, added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue, the uncomfortable truth surfaced again: the firewall is not a wall. It is a computer at the edge of your network that runs soft...

Should Schools Remove Pupil Photos from Public Websites? A school removes all identifiable pupil photos from its website and social media. A parent complains their child's sporting achievement has been erased. The safeguarding lead sees reduced risk. The marketing lead sees lost warmth. The headteacher is caught in the middle. This What If Wednesday unpacks the tension between celebration and safe...

Noel Bradford and Mauven MacLeod mark the first anniversary of The Small Business Cyber Security Guy by doing what they ask of small businesses: an honest review. No self-congratulation, no marketing gloss. Instead, the hosts correct the mistakes that mattered, including overuse of misleading breach statistics, presenting multi-factor authentication as a finish line rather than a foundation, and u...

It starts with a slow ticket, a missing laptop and a printer staging yet another tiny rebellion — the kind of problems every small business sees and understands. But behind those visible slips is a quieter, far more dangerous story: patches that didn’t run, MFA that wasn’t enforced, backups that wouldn’t restore. In this episode Noel Bradford and a panel of experts follow a simple, devastating que...

Multi-factor authentication is essential, but not all MFA is equal. When users receive vague, repeated, or poorly explained prompts, they start treating them like cookie banners: accept, accept, make it go away. Attackers exploit this fatigue by triggering prompts under pressure, impersonating IT support, or using social engineering to bypass weak helpdesk processes. This is not a user failure; it...

Shadow AI has already arrived in most UK small businesses, often through browser tabs, SaaS tool sidebars, and helpful buttons that promise to improve text. Staff are using AI to rewrite emails, summarise meetings, polish proposals, and speed up admin tasks, frequently without approval, policy, or controls. This is shadow IT all over again, but faster and with better branding. The problem is not t...

Imagine opening your SaaS admin panel and walking into Times Square: flashing upsells, trial banners, an AI button nobody asked for, and a marketplace pitch vying for your click. In this episode, Noel Bradford—your Security Guy—takes you through that sensory overload and shows how it’s not just annoying design; it’s a security problem. When every notification screams for attention, the real alarms...

Noel Bradford opens the episode with a wry grin and a simple warning: AI has put a jet engine on vulnerability discovery, and that turbocharged speed is coming straight for your patch queue. He paints a scene that starts idyllic—researchers, vendors, and defenders holding hands in a meadow—and then smashes it into the small-business reality everyone knows: an ageing accounts package, two neglected...

Noel Bradford opens the episode with a blunt question: what does a cyber attack really cost your business? He takes us out of the server cupboard and into the meeting room, where time lost, money gone, reputations dented and growth stalled are the metrics that actually matter. Through vivid examples—payment fraud that empties a ledger, ransomware that freezes production, a supplier breach that han...

Noel Bradford opens the episode with a provocation: backups are sacred in small businesses, but too often they're a comforting myth. Picture a bright Monday at 9am — the backup dashboard is full of green ticks, the MSP report lands in an inbox that breathes a little easier, and then a criminal in muddy boots asks the question nobody practised: what can you actually recover, by when, and who knows...

It begins simply: a worn hardback on a bookshelf, a black marker on the title page, and a 75-cent discrepancy in a lab bill. What sounds like a footnote in an accounting ledger becomes the hook of a detective story—one where curiosity, persistence, and a refusal to write off tiny anomalies expose an international spy ring. We pull you back to the mid-1980s at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, where phones, m...

Cybersecurity Guide — Noel Bradford takes you inside a familiar office on an ordinary afternoon, where the threat isn’t a dramatic breach but the quiet, avoidable moment someone decided not to ask a question. This episode treats curiosity as a defence: not a flashy tool or dashboard, but the simple act of saying, "hang on, that looks wrong," and the cultural choices that kill it. Through vivid, ev...

I’m Noel Bradford and this episode opens with a simple, unsettling image: a little black NVR humming away since 2017 like a haunted toaster with network access. That hum is not background noise — it’s the beginning of a story about negligence, default settings and the strange ways everyday devices turn into windows into your business. We follow a typical small-business scene: an installer fits cam...

Noel Bradford rips into the cyber marketing circus and pulls back the curtain on the real threat modern businesses are ignoring. He opens with a laugh — and a damning image: a hip vegan coffee shop, oat milk lattes, a creator’s scare-ad for a VPN, and an affiliate link. It’s funny until you realise the joke’s on us. In 2014 we defended the network; in 2026 attackers simply walk through the front d...

The call starts like any other—slides, a sales voice, a tidy monthly price—and then it goes sideways. Noel Bradford walks listeners into a vendor meeting that feels less like a sales pitch and more like a cautionary tale: a shiny cyber bundle advertised to small businesses, but missing the muscle when real danger arrives. Against the hum of corporate growth statistics and glowing dashboards, Noel...

I'm Noel Bradford, and today the app millions of us told our users to trust has just become the story. Microsoft Authenticator — the little green tick that used to mean 'you’re safe' — has a flaw: CVE-2026-41615. It sounds like a dry line on a vulnerability list, but the reality is cinematic. An app on a phone, a single tap, and a service can be tricked into handing an attacker the very token that...

Listen as Noel Bradford — the Small Business Cyber Security Guy — pulls back the curtain on a criminal economy that looks eerily like a legitimate market. The story begins not with a hooded hacker in a basement but with supply chains, service desks, affiliate margins and racks of phones pretending to be people: an industrialised machine that Europol lays bare in IOCTA 2026. Imagine a landlord who...

The 43% Cyber Attack Statistic: Are We Being Sold Fear? Every spring, the UK government drops a cyber statistic that makes headlines, fills vendor slide decks, and gives nervous business owners another reason to stare bleakly into their coffee. The claim? Around 43% of UK businesses suffered a cyber breach or attack last year. Sounds terrifying, doesn’t it? Except there is a problem. A bloody big...

The Celebrity Stalkerware Leak: Not Encryption, Endpoint Compromise In late April 2026, headlines screamed about 86,000 private screenshots leaked from a prominent European celebrity's phone. The story dominated tech press coverage, but crucial context went missing. This was not hackers breaking encryption or sophisticated cyber warfare. It was endpoint compromise: stalkerware capturing screenshot...

Noel Bradford delivers a direct examination of YellowKey, the reported BitLocker bypass that exploits the Windows Recovery Environment on TPM-only configurations. This episode strips away vendor comfort narratives and green-tick dashboards to focus on what default encryption settings actually protect against when a laptop is stolen or accessed physically. He explains how YellowKey targets trusted...

They said the fine was £828,000 in some headlines — the ICO said £963,900. Numbers matter, but the real scandal is deeper than a headline figure: this is about trust, monopoly, and a regulator that finally acted. In this episode the Small Business Cybersecurity Guide tells the story of how a single phishing email in September 2020 became a twenty‑month lodger inside a utility network, and how a mo...

It’s that time of the month: Patch Tuesday. The headlines shout 137 CVEs and a perfect 10.0 somewhere in the noise, but this episode narrows the story down from global panic to what actually matters for a small business with a server room, a handful of laptops, and a CEO who needs to log in on Monday morning. I’m Graham Falkner and in this edition of the Small Business Cyber Security Guy I walk yo...

It starts with a tempting spreadsheet: 25 staff, a cheaper IT quote that shaves £35 per user off the bill — £10,500 a year saved, instantly seductive. Noel Bradford and Mauven McLeod open this episode by turning that neat number upside down and asking the one question every business owner should be able to answer: what exactly has been removed from the service to make that price possible? They wal...