The water off Duxbury Beach looks the same in July as it does in February. Calm, blue-grey, unbothered. What's underneath it is not the same at all. It's what makes Shark Week so thrilling every year, the idea of danger lurking just under the surface.
Anyone who's spent a summer on the South Shore or the Outer Cape in the last decade knows the shift. What was once a rare Cape Cod curiosity is now a routine part of the season. Great white sightings off Chatham, Wellfleet, and Nauset are logged daily on the Sharktivity app. Beaches get closed for an hour, reopened, closed again. Seals bob just past the sandbar and everyone standing on the beach knows exactly what that means. The population has recovered. So has the predator that follows it.
The animals don't announce themselves. They don't circle. They don't warn. They move quietly through water that looks empty to the person standing on the shore, and by the time anyone sees the fin, the decision-making window is already closed.
Cybercriminals operate the same way. And summer is their season for the same reason it's the sharks' — the routines relax, the water gets busier, and the people who normally keep watch are somewhere else.
Here are three of them moving through Massachusetts Bay right now.
1. Fake invoices and vendor impersonation
Attackers rarely need to break through anything. They need one convincing email.
This is business email compromise — BEC — and it works by impersonating a vendor, a subcontractor, or an executive your team already trusts. The message reads like every other invoice that lands on a Tuesday. Someone in accounts payable processes the payment. By the time anyone realizes the wire went to an account that doesn't belong to your actual vendor, the money is somewhere in Eastern Europe and the bank is politely explaining that recovery is unlikely.
These attacks spike in July and August for a specific reason. When the person who normally approves payments is out on the Cape for two weeks, the request gets redirected to somebody covering — often somebody who doesn't know exactly what normal is supposed to look like. Temporary coverage makes urgency easier to fake and red flags harder to catch.
The safeguard is unglamorous and effective: build a verification step into every financial request that comes in by email. A thirty-second phone call to a trusted number — not the one in the email — stops the vast majority of these before the money moves.
2. Phishing attacks aimed at distracted employees
Phishing works because it's built around how people behave when they're moving fast.
Attackers plan for the distracted moments. A password reset alert lands right before a client meeting. A text arrives that looks like it came from IT, right when someone's trying to get out the door for a long weekend on the Cape. An email asking for urgent approval on a wire transfer shows up two minutes before a call. Nobody stops to verify because pausing feels slower than reacting, and reacting feels like doing the job.
The strongest defense isn't a piece of software. It's a team that knows it's allowed to slow down.
The moments worth pausing for are usually the ordinary ones:
- An unexpected login request or MFA prompt
- A payment instruction that came in from nowhere
- A link in an email that wasn't part of any conversation
Attackers rely on speed to win. When your team pauses, verifies, and questions the shape of a request, that advantage goes away — and the attack usually goes with it.
3. Third-party risks that spread fast
When a vendor with access to your systems gets compromised, the threat doesn't stay with them. It moves into your environment through whatever connection they still have to your business — an integration, a stored credential, a shared login somebody set up in 2022 and nobody's touched since.
This is supply chain exposure, and most businesses across greater Boston have significantly more of it than they realize. Software connected to the network. Service providers holding credentials. Contractors whose access was granted for a two-week project and never actually revoked when the project ended. All of it accumulates over time, and almost none of it gets mapped until something forces the conversation.
Outsourcing a service does not outsource the risk that comes with it.
To understand where your exposure sits, three questions have to have clear answers:
- Which vendors can access your systems or data?
- What specifically are they connecting to?
- Who internally owns each of those relationships?
If those answers take more than a few minutes to produce, you're carrying risk you don't currently see.
By the time you notice it, the threat is already moving
The Plymouth fishermen who've been on the water thirty years will tell you the same thing: the sharks that show up on the Sharktivity app are the ones close enough to detect. The number actually out there is bigger.
The cybercriminals targeting businesses across greater Boston and the South Shore work the same way. The incidents that make the news are the ones that got detected. The rest sit in inboxes, in stale vendor connections, in Microsoft 365 accounts nobody's audited since 2023, waiting.
The businesses that get hit are rarely the ones ignoring obvious warnings. They're the ones assuming everything is fine because nothing looks wrong from the beach. Summer is when schedules loosen, coverage thins, and the surface goes quiet. That's when the movement underneath tends to be at its most active.
Systems Support helps businesses across greater Boston and the South Shore see what's actually moving through their environment — vendor access nobody's mapped, employee behavior that hasn't been tested, everyday operations that quietly stopped matching the security posture on paper. Before a problem becomes an incident. Before the fin breaks the surface.
If it's been a while since anyone walked through where your business is actually exposed, that's worth a fifteen-minute conversation.
Give us a call at 781-837-0069 or click here to book your free 15-Minute Discovery Call.
If you know another business owner heading into August on autopilot, send this their way. They're probably watching the same water.
