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

Nothing kills a productive day faster than technology that doesn't work.

Your team is trying to get things done, and instead they're waiting on a system that's slow, rebooting after a crash, or sitting on hold with a help desk that doesn't pick up.

Every one of those interruptions has a real cost in lost time and frustrated employees.

The three IT mistakes that hit Chicago businesses hardest:

⬆️ Reacting to problems after they've already disrupted operations, instead of catching them early

⬆️ Tolerating recurring downtime, bugs, and glitches that chip away at productivity every single week

⬆️ Running outdated technology with an IT team that's stretched too thin to keep up

Proactive managed IT fixes all three.

Not by adding more tools, but by having the right people watching your systems before things go sideways.

If any of those sound familiar, let's talk 👇

goleadingit.com/contact-us/

Your email filter is blocking malicious links.

So attackers stopped sending links.

Now they're sending QR codes.

Here's why that's a problem.

QR codes embedded in email images can't be scanned by desktop security filters.

So when an employee opens that email and scans the code with their phone, the click happens on a personal device that has zero corporate security on it.

The filter never saw it.

The threat never got flagged.

The numbers from Q1 2026 tell the story pretty clearly:

📱 Email-embedded QR codes surged 336% in March 2026 alone

📈 QR phishing volume grew 146% across Q1 2026

💸 U.S. phishing losses jumped 208% from 2024 to 2025

🪤 CAPTCHA phishing climbed 125% year over year

This is what happens when attackers adapt faster than defenses do.

The technique works specifically because it routes around the tools most businesses already have in place.

Employee awareness is the first line of defense here.

If your team doesn't know what QR code phishing looks like, they're walking into it blind.

Not sure if your team is ready?

Let's find out.

goleadingit.com/contact-us/

Sources: Microsoft Q1 2026 Email Threat Landscape, FBI IC3 2025, Keepnet Labs, Kaspersky

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/

A few weeks ago, hackers shut down Canvas, the learning platform used by 41% of American colleges, right in the middle of finals week.

Students across the country opened their laptops to study and found a ransom note where their login page used to be.

Professors couldn't access grades.

Assignments disappeared.

Schools scrambled to extend deadlines and rearrange entire exam schedules.

The hackers, a group called ShinyHunters, claimed they stole 3.65 terabytes of data from 275 million students, teachers, and staff across nearly 9,000 schools worldwide.

Names, email addresses, student IDs, and billions of private messages between students and teachers.

On Monday night, Instructure, the company behind Canvas, confirmed they paid the ransom.

Congress is now investigating.

This is the largest educational data breach in history.

And it happened because the attackers exploited a vulnerability in Canvas's free teacher accounts.

One overlooked entry point.

275 million people affected.

For Chicago business owners, this is a lesson in how a single weak spot can bring down an entire organization.

It doesn't matter how big you are or how much you spend on security if there's a door you forgot to lock.

🔒 Audit every access point to your systems, including free accounts, trial accounts, and old logins

🔑 Remove access for any accounts that aren't actively being used

✅ Have an incident response plan before you need one, not after

If a platform serving 9,000 schools can go down from one overlooked account type, what's the overlooked entry point in your business?

🏁 GO FAST. DON'T DIE.

This describes exactly who succeeds here.

We're not looking for someone who needs perfect conditions before taking action.

We're looking for someone who sees an opportunity and goes.

Someone who would rather be in front of customers than sitting in internal meetings.

Someone who wants to build something.

If your favorite part of sales is the hunt, the conversation, the challenge, and the win...

You might be exactly who we're looking for.

LeadingIT is hiring a Director of Business Development to help us continue our growth across Chicagoland.

No corporate red tape.
No endless approval chains.
No waiting around.

Just opportunities, support, and the freedom to perform.

Ready to hit the gas?

Apply today! https://goleadingit.com/careers/

This is what the LeadingIT tech team actually looks like:

People who are focused, genuinely good at what they do, and enjoy working together.

We're hiring engineers and technicians to join a team that supports Chicagoland businesses every day.

Real problems, real clients, real work that matters.

If you're the kind of person who gets satisfaction from figuring something out and handing it back to a client fully resolved, this is the right environment.

We're not a faceless corporation.

You'll know the people you work with and you'll see the impact of what you do.

👉 Apply at goleadingit.com/careers

Tag someone on your team who should make the jump.

Most Chicago business owners didn't start their company to spend their days worrying about ransomware, compliance deadlines, and whether their backups actually work.

But that's where a lot of them end up.

When your IT is managed by the right partner, that mental load goes somewhere else.

Not to a help desk ticket you're waiting on.

Not to a vendor you can't reach.

Somewhere it actually gets handled, quietly, before it ever reaches your inbox.

That's the whole idea behind what we do at LeadingIT.

Your goals stay front and center.

The technology fears?

Those are ours to carry.

Learn more at goleadingit.com

Congratulations to our very own Tina Congine on earning her Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute!

The PMP is one of the most respected credentials in the world, and it's not easy to get.

It requires proven experience leading projects, 35 hours of formal project management education, and demonstrates the ability to manage people, processes, and business priorities across any industry.

Tina put in the work and earned it.

This is a reflection of what we already know about Tina, she's sharp, she's thorough, and she gets things across the finish line.

Having that recognized at the highest level of the profession is well deserved.

Tina, the whole LeadingIT team is proud of you.

Now let's get back to work. 🎉