Chicago, Illinois · Cybersecurity, compliance and GRC for businesses that cannot afford a bad week

You built it in Chicago. We keep it yours, around the clock.

Thirty years of drawings in a West Loop studio, twenty years of charts in a Naperville practice, a shop in Elgin that supplies a prime. Somebody overseas is working on getting in while you sit on the Kennedy. We are the Chicago team on the other side of that, from our office on Western Avenue.

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Chicago-based, serving ChicagolandEngineer on site for practicesPublic pricingStaff training included

Serving the Loop, West Loop and Fulton Market, River North, the Illinois Medical District, Naperville, Oak Brook, Schaumburg and Evanston and the North Shore. Remote first, on site when it matters.

A Chicago story

The Tuesday thirty years of drawings became a ransom note

a principal at a 22-person architecture studio in the West Loop

It is 7:40 on a Tuesday in February and the principal is on the Kennedy, already late. The studio on Randolph opens in twenty minutes. Thirty years of drawings sit on the server in the back room: every school in the western suburbs the firm ever touched, the hospital wing in Streeterville, the loft conversions that made its name. Half the staff has never printed one.

At 8:05 the office manager opens an invoice from a lighting supplier the firm pays every month. The logo is right. The amount is right. The link asks her to sign in to view the PDF, so she does, because the last twelve invoices asked the same thing. Nobody at that desk did anything a careful person would not do.

By 8:20 a login from a country the firm has never billed is copying the drawing archive. At 8:31 the first folder locks. The renders for Thursday's client presentation go gray one thumbnail at a time.

The principal walks in at 8:40 to an engineer on the phone from Western Avenue, not a ransom note. The 2 a.m. backup restores four folders before lunch. Thursday's presentation happens on Thursday.

At 8:33 the protection agent on her workstation cuts the session and isolates the machine, and the copying stops at four folders out of nine hundred.

What changes the ending

Offline, tested backups that restore the archive before the client presentation, not after the ransom deadline (CIS 11 Data Recovery).
Phishing-resistant MFA on every mailbox, so a password typed into a fake invoice page is a dead end (CIS 6 Access Control Management).
A protection agent on every workstation that contains the session in seconds, watched by an engineer who calls you (CIS 13 Network Monitoring and Defense).

What price are you willing to pay to let thirty years of building in this city go away because someone overseas tricked one person on your team into clicking a link? I watched it nearly happen to my own family. We would rather you take the vacation you earned and land at O'Hare to find payroll still there and the drawings where you left them.

Sam Khan, founder. The Cyber Expert in times of peace.

Illinois, by the numbers

What the FBI, the state and the researchers counted, not what a vendor guessed.

$535.3M

lost to internet crime by Illinois victims in 2025, across 32,980 complaints, up from $479 million the year before

Source: FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report, Illinois state page; WCIA, 2026

$109.8M

of that was business email compromise, the changed invoice and the changed wire, across 848 Illinois complaints

Source: FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report, Illinois state page, 2026

48%

of breaches worldwide now involve ransomware; the median ransom paid was $139,875

Source: Verizon 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report

The law and its clock

Illinois Personal Information Protection Act (815 ILCS 530)

Notify affected Illinois residents in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay. Notify the Attorney General when more than 500 Illinois residents are notified from a single breach, no later than the consumer notice goes out.

Regulator: Illinois Attorney General · source

Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (740 ILCS 14)

Written consent and a public retention schedule before a fingerprint time clock or a face scan at patient check-in collects anything. Enforced by private lawsuits, which is why it matters to a 15-person practice.

Regulator: Illinois courts, private right of action

Illinois Insurance Data Security Law (215 ILCS 215)

Insurance licensees notify the Department of Insurance within 3 business days of determining a cybersecurity event. Illinois-domiciled insurers certify compliance every April 15.

Regulator: Illinois Department of Insurance · source

The regulator has the final say. We help interpret, scope and get you ready; we do not certify.

It happened here

Lurie Children's Hospital took its systems offline after a ransomware attack claimed by the Rhysida group; the outage lasted weeks and the hospital later confirmed data of almost 792,000 people was affected.

January 2024 · Chicago Sun-Times

Ascension's ransomware incident disrupted electronic records and diverted ambulances across its hospitals, including its Chicago-area hospitals; 5.6 million people were later confirmed affected.

May 2024 · TechCrunch

Chicago Public Schools told families that a ransomware attack on a third-party file-transfer vendor exposed data of more than 700,000 current and former students.

March 2025 · Chalkbeat Chicago

We list public incidents to show the pattern, never to shame a victim. Any of them could be any of us.

Who we protect in Chicago

Same controls, told from where it hurts for your business.

Medical and dental practices

What if the front desk's inbox is the one that pays the vendors and holds the patient schedule?

Every workstation and the practice-management server watched around the clock, offline backups that restore charts in hours, MFA on every login, and a HIPAA risk analysis your license can stand on.

Education and health services is Chicagoland's third-largest job sector at 811,600 jobs and still growing 1.8% a year (BLS, July 2026); Illinois has 42,102 active physicians and 8,464 active dentists (KFF, 2026 and 2024).

How we protect medical and dental practices →

Architecture and engineering studios

What if thirty years of drawings sit on one server in the back room and the backup nobody tested is on the same network?

The archive backed up offline and restored on a schedule you can watch, the file server patched and watched, and every login behind MFA so a stolen password is not a set of keys.

The design firms that feed Chicago construction sit inside the metro's 817,900 professional and business services jobs (BLS, July 2026), and ransomware now appears in 48% of breaches (Verizon 2026 DBIR).

How we protect architecture and engineering studios →

Law firms

What if the paralegal calls the number in the email to confirm the wire, and the bad guy answers?

Lookalike-domain filtering on every mailbox, a wire-verification rule your staff practices, MFA that keeps strangers out of partner inboxes, and an engineer who sees the login from the wrong country before the money moves.

Business email compromise cost Illinois $109.8 million across 848 complaints in 2025 (FBI IC3), and the Loop and West Loop hold the densest concentration of firms in the state.

How we protect law firms →

Manufacturers and defense subcontractors

What if the prime asks for our NIST 800-171 score on Friday and we do not have one?

CUI in one controlled place, the 110 NIST SP 800-171 practices assessed and scored, a System Security Plan you can hand to the prime, and the shop floor protected while you keep cutting metal.

Chicagoland has 410,400 manufacturing jobs (BLS, July 2026), with defense subcontractors in the south suburbs, Elgin and the Rockford corridor; 61% of manufacturing breaches involve a third party (Verizon 2026 DBIR).

How we protect manufacturers and defense subcontractors →

Insurance agencies and financial firms

What if the Department of Insurance asks why we did not report the event within three business days?

The controls 215 ILCS 215 expects, evidence produced once and kept current, client data encrypted and access reviewed, and 24/7 watching so the three-day clock starts with a phone call from us, not a surprise.

Financial activities employ 306,100 people in the metro (BLS, July 2026), and Illinois insurance licensees must report a cybersecurity event to the Department of Insurance within 3 business days.

How we protect insurance agencies and financial firms →

Medical, dental and other healthcare practices

In Chicago an AccuSights cybersecurity engineer comes to the practice, from the Loop to Naperville and up the North Shore, and sets up the critical controls and the protection agent the same week.

The critical security controls set up in the office, the protection agent on every workstation and the server, the staff trained the same week, and a HIPAA risk analysis that holds up. We work at your speed and we do not bill you per module.

Defense suppliers: Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, prime offices in Rolling Meadows and Niles, and a subcontractor base across the south suburbs and the Rockford corridor make CMMC a Chicagoland conversation. The July 2026 pause of the C3PAO mandate is not a pardon: NIST SP 800-171 stays in the contract, and we get you assessed and scored before the prime asks.

Your staff, trained and scored

It is fine to skip the new Nigerian prince's email. Next time, press the report button too.

Your Naperville front desk and your Loop associates get the same short, scored training each month, built around what we see in Chicago inboxes that month, not a yearly video in a conference room. Phishing tests teach one habit above all: press the report button, and an engineer sees it. Nobody is billed per module and nobody is shamed for a click.

Short monthly training tied to the threats we are seeing this month, not a yearly video.
Scored per person and per team, so you know who needs a hand and nobody gets nickel-and-dimed for a module.
Phishing tests that teach the report habit; one report protects the whole company.

Enterprise-grade software, engineers who did this for the largest institutions, and a team that actually picks up the phone. We built this for the institutions that spend the most. We run it for you because we care about what you built.

What we do for a Chicago business

Assess it, keep it compliant, protect it around the clock.

Assess

Cybersecurity and Data Protection Assessment (CDPA)

Where the money, the records and the drawings actually live, what would stop the business, and the ten fixes that matter first. Scored against the CIS Controls and whatever rules apply to you.

Details →

Comply

Compliance, kept current

HIPAA, CMMC, SOC 2, PCI, the FTC Safeguards Rule, state privacy law: one control set, evidence produced once, ready the day a regulator, a prime or a customer asks.

Details →

Protect

24/7 protection for every employee, endpoint, server and website

An AI security agent that contains a threat in seconds and a named human engineer who watches it, day and night. Think of it as a per-employee service, like payroll, except that cutting this corner is the one that can empty the account.

Details →

Or start with the 3-minute test

Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC), simplified

The discipline the largest institutions run, sized for a business that cannot hire a department for it.

Governance, Risk and Compliance is how a bank or a hospital system decides what to protect, proves it is protected, and shows a regulator the evidence. We ran it for those institutions. We now run it for the 30-person supplier, the medical practice and the defense subcontractor, because that is where the supply chain is thinnest and where a breach does the most damage, sometimes to more than one company.

Governance

Who owns security, which policies are real, and what the owner signs. One page, not a binder.

Risk

What could stop the business, ranked by likelihood and cost, refreshed as the threats change, not once a year.

Compliance

The evidence a regulator, a prime contractor or a customer asks for, produced once and kept current every day.

A defense contractor with 40 people is a link in a national supply chain. A breach there is not a small-business story; it is a national-security one. The same is true, at a smaller scale, for the accounting firm that holds 900 client returns and the clinic that holds 12,000 patient records.

Questions Chicago owners ask

What people in Chicago search for, answered straight.

How much does cybersecurity cost for a small business in Chicago?

Our pricing is public and it is per employee, like payroll, with the assessment priced as a fixed fee. A 30-minute demo scopes it for your practice, firm or shop, and you leave with a number, not a proposal cycle.

What does Illinois law require after a data breach?

The Personal Information Protection Act requires notice to affected Illinois residents without unreasonable delay, and notice to the Attorney General when more than 500 residents are notified from one breach. HIPAA adds its own 60-day clock for patient data, and BIPA adds private lawsuits if biometrics were involved. The cheaper path is the one where nothing leaves.

Does a Chicago dental or medical practice need a HIPAA risk analysis every year?

HIPAA requires a documented risk analysis and requires you to keep it current, which regulators read as at least annual and after any major change. Ours is done on site, from the Loop to Naperville, alongside the controls that make the findings go away. The analysis and the fix arrive in the same week.

Do I need to worry about BIPA if we use a fingerprint time clock?

Yes. BIPA requires written consent and a published retention policy before a fingerprint or face scan is collected, and it is enforced by private lawsuits against businesses of any size. We fold the consent, retention and access controls into the same assessment, so the time clock stops being a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Does a Chicago-area machine shop need a CMMC consultant?

If you hold controlled unclassified information for a prime, the answer is yes, and it was yes before CMMC existed because NIST SP 800-171 has been in the contract since 2017. The July 2026 pause of the C3PAO mandate did not remove that. We assess the 110 practices, score you, write the System Security Plan and fix the gaps.

Should I hire one of the big cybersecurity companies instead of a local Chicago team?

The big names sell to institutions with security teams of their own. A 30-person practice needs the same software those institutions run and a named engineer who picks up the phone and drives to Oak Brook when it matters. That is what we built, and we are based on Western Avenue.

Sources: FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report, Illinois · WCIA on the Illinois IC3 figures, 2026 · 815 ILCS 530 · Illinois Attorney General, data breach guidance · 215 ILCS 215 · Illinois Department of Insurance bulletin CB2024-10 · BLS, Chicago-Naperville-Elgin Economy at a Glance · KFF, professionally active physicians · KFF, professionally active dentists · Chicago Sun-Times, Lurie Children's · HIPAA Journal, Lurie Children's · TechCrunch, Ascension · Chalkbeat Chicago, CPS · FBI Chicago Field Office · CISA Region 5 · Verizon 2026 DBIR

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