October 2026 is Cybersecurity Awareness Month again, which is as good a reason as any for Fort Myers businesses to take a few minutes and make sure the basics are covered. You don’t need to be a security expert, just a handful of smart habits can keep you out of trouble.
Where to start: Of the five, the two that take an afternoon and then keep paying you back are a hardware security key and getting the office off Windows Home. Those are the YubiKey 5 and our current business laptop picks under $1,000.
Here are five things you can do this week that’ll make a real difference:
- Use actual strong passwords, Skip the pet names and birthdays. If you can remember your password easily, it’s probably not great. A password manager like Bitwarden or 1Password takes the hassle out of using long, random passwords for everything.
- Turn on multi-factor authentication, That extra step where you confirm a login with your phone? It blocks the vast majority of unauthorized logins. It takes two minutes to set up and it’s one of the most effective things you can do.
- Actually install those software updates, I know, the “restart to update” notifications are annoying. But those updates patch security holes that hackers actively exploit. Putting them off is basically leaving a window open.
- Be skeptical of email, If something feels even a little off, weird sender, unexpected attachment, a link that doesn’t match where it says it goes, don’t click it. Phishing emails are good enough now to fool experienced tech people.
- Back up your data, If ransomware hits tomorrow, do you have a clean copy of everything that matters? If the answer is “I think so” or “probably,” that’s not good enough. Set up automated backups and test them.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2026: something for the staff
Most of the list above lands on whoever runs the office. The other half is the people opening the email, and the yearly training video doesn’t stick for long (by March most people couldn’t tell you what was in it). So this year we put up twelve free security awareness posters. Print them for the break room or email them to the team, no signup needed.
The idea is to swap one out each month so there’s always something new on the wall. We wrote up how that works, and why it holds up better than a once a year slideshow, in our security awareness training post. Pick whichever poster fits what your office keeps running into and start there.
None of this is complicated, and all of it can prevent a really bad day.
If you want help getting any of this set up for your office, password managers, MFA, backup systems, whatever, HenkTek can handle it. Give us a call at (239) 234-2334. We work with small businesses across Fort Myers, Cape Coral, and Southwest Florida.
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HenkTek is a local IT company in Fort Myers that looks after the technology Southwest Florida businesses depend on, from Cape Coral and Bonita Springs to Naples. We handle managed IT, cybersecurity, backups and help desk support, and we explain things in plain English.