It is Christmas Eve. Your trucks are loaded, your customers are waiting on holiday orders, and every file your company runs on has just been locked by someone you will never meet. No invoices. No inventory. No way to work.
That is not a hypothetical. It happened to a Long Island food distribution company in 2023, and the person who answered the phone that night is a member of our chapter.
Mahmoud Khamis holds the IT seat at BNI Coastal Connections and runs TeamLogic IT here in East Islip, providing managed IT and cybersecurity to small and medium sized businesses across Suffolk and Nassau. He sat down with us for a member interview, and what came out of it was less of a sales pitch and more of a warning worth passing along to every business owner on the Island.
The Christmas Eve call
The company was not even a client yet. They called because they had nowhere else to turn.
"It was Christmas Eve in 2023, and their company had been ransomwared. They didn't pay the ransom, all their files got encrypted, and they couldn't work. They're a food distribution company, and this was not acceptable during the holidays. So we spent all night getting them back online."
Read that last sentence again. Not a ticket, not a callback on the 26th. An all night recovery, on a holiday, for a business that had no relationship with him yet.
How they got in, in plain English
There was no Hollywood hacker here. There was one employee and one set of stolen credentials.
"They didn't have proper security in place. An employee was compromised, and through that employee's credentials, they were able to access the rest of the company data and encrypt all of it. Encrypt means you cannot access it without a certain key, and that key was being held for ransom."
This is the part most owners miss. Attackers rarely break the front door. They log in as someone who already has a key, and then they take everything that person can reach. Which is why cybersecurity for Long Island small businesses is not a firewall you buy once. It is access control, monitoring, and a plan for the morning it goes wrong.
The one thing he says is not optional
Ask Mahmoud where an owner should start and he does not hedge.
"Something most of our clients do not have when we take them on, and I stress that it's imperative and it's not an option, is email threat protection. This filters out malicious messages, a majority of spam and junk, and it lets you refine a whitelist and a blacklist for your company so that attacks are much less likely to happen."
Email is where the credential theft starts. Filter the message and you never have the compromised employee, which means you never have the encrypted server. It is the cheapest link in the chain to fix and the one most often left alone.
Three things worth checking this week, whoever handles your IT:
- Email threat protection. Not just the spam folder your provider gives you by default. Actual filtering, with a list you control.
- Who can reach what. If one compromised login can touch every file in the company, you have the same exposure that food distributor had.
- A tested restore. Backups you have never restored from are a hope, not a plan. That is the whole point of business continuity and disaster recovery.
What happened to that company
They became a client that night.
"Now they're fully managed by us, and something like that has a very small likelihood of happening again."
Who he actually works best with
No vertical, no minimum size, and a specific kind of relationship.
"No particular industry, but we work with small and medium sized family businesses are our specialty. So businesses looking to grow and looking to grow with an IT company that won't take advantage of them in the process."
The other thing that stood out: he refuses the idea of a difficult client. Some of his customers are on co-managed IT alongside their own internal person, some pay nothing monthly and use him hourly on call, some pay under the standard managed IT fee for a slice of the services.
"There is really no nightmare, because we can completely work around whatever your needs are. I would say the only non-ideal client is somebody who doesn't really understand the value of securing their business."
What he left us with
If your IT only shows up after something breaks, you are one stolen password away from your own Christmas Eve. Start with email, know who can reach what, and test the restore. If you would rather have someone look at it with you, Mahmoud offers a free consultation to businesses on Long Island.
Connect with Mahmoud Khamis
- TeamLogic IT, East Islip — https://www.teamlogicit.com/WestBabylonNY
- Cybersecurity services — https://www.teamlogicit.com/WestBabylonNY/Cybersecurity
- Request a consultation — https://www.teamlogicit.com/WestBabylonNY/Request-A-Consultation
Mahmoud holds the IT services seat at BNI Coastal Connections, which meets Tuesdays 6:30 to 8:00 PM in East Islip. One seat per industry, no competition. See more member ten minute features or visit bnilongisland.com to find out about our open categories.