Your Cyber Budget Is Growing, But So Is Your Risk

You walk into the office. The lights are on. The coffee’s brewing. Everything looks normal. Until it isn’t.

Your laptop won’t boot. Your cloud drives are empty. Every desktop screen in the building is showing the same message:

“Your files are encrypted. Pay now or lose everything.”

You check your phone. New messages. Your sales manager is panicking. HR can’t access payroll. Some customers are already getting odd emails with your signature at the bottom.

That’s when it really hits you. You’re not the victim of a simple glitch. You’re in the middle of a full-blown cyberattack. Your systems are locked, your data is compromised, and the people whose trust you worked years to earn are now being blackmailed.

And the worst part?

You had the tools. You did what everyone said you were supposed to do. You had antivirus. You paid for a firewall. You checked the box for “security software” and assumed that meant you were covered.

But hackers are counting on that assumption. They’re betting their entire business model on it.

Click Happens

Let’s be honest. No matter how many awareness trainings you give your team, someone is going to click the link. It happens.

But clicking isn’t what kills a business. Not having a plan for what comes after the click is the real problem.

Hackers know how to get in. What matters is whether they can move once they’re inside. If your systems aren’t built to detect, delay, or deny that movement, the rest of your tech stack doesn’t matter.

Here’s a hard truth: most breaches don’t happen because a company didn’t buy the right tools. They happen because no one ever checked if those tools were working together.

You Can’t Fix What You’re Not Testing

Cybersecurity isn’t just about prevention. It’s about validation.

The question isn’t “Do you have tools in place?” The question is “Have you tested them?”

Most companies never do. They assume they’re covered because a vendor said so or because it passed a compliance checkbox or because no one’s hacked them yet.

But as every firefighter knows, the time to test your smoke alarms is before the house is on fire.

So how do you test your environment without breaking it?

Start small. Start safe. Start with a controlled penetration test.

What Is a Level 1 Pen Test And Why It Works

At Galactic, we provide an analysis called a Level 1 Pen Test.

It’s simple, fast, and designed for business leaders, not just IT teams.

We send your organization a single test link. That’s it. One link. One click. And from there, we analyze how far an attacker could get inside your network if that one employee made a single mistake.

We don’t just show you if someone clicked. We show you what would happen next.

Could the attacker access your payroll system? Move laterally across devices? Crack passwords? Exfiltrate data?

It’s a simulated breach built to expose gaps in your defenses without causing any harm.

You walk away with a real‑world understanding of your current risk and a map of where your security is strong and where it’s paper thin.

This Isn’t About Fear. It’s About Control.

Every CEO we talk to says the same thing: “I don’t want to overreact, but I also don’t want to be blindsided.” That’s fair. You’ve got enough to do running the business. You shouldn’t have to become a cyber expert overnight.

But you do need visibility. You need to know what’s working. You need to know what’s vulnerable. And you need to know how your team would respond when a real attack comes.

The Level 1 Pen Test gives you all of that without overwhelm, without jargon, and without pretending that installing one more software agent will save the day.

Start Small. Just Start.

This isn’t about building the perfect cyber program overnight. It’s about taking the first step toward a security strategy that actually works.

Start with a test. See how your current defenses hold up. Then use that insight to make smarter decisions about people, processes, tools, and risk.

Because the worst time to find out your security tools don’t work is when your systems are already locked and someone else controls your business.

Let’s find the holes before the hackers do.