IT services in Sayreville, NJ

Sayreville sits on the south bank of the Raritan River, where the Driscoll, Edison and Victory bridges cross toward Woodbridge and Perth Amboy. It's an industrial town by history — clay and brick for more than a century, then DuPont and other manufacturers — and it still has a working industrial side, with manufacturing and warehouse buildings along Jernee Mill Road and elsewhere, alongside residential Parlin, Morgan and Melrose.

The former National Lead site on the river is now Riverton, a large mixed-use redevelopment, so the town is changing. The two problems we'd raise here, though, are older than that.

The fake invoice and the changed bank details

Businesses that buy materials and pay suppliers — manufacturers, distributors, contractors, trucking companies — are the main target of one of the most expensive frauds a small firm can suffer: business email compromise. A criminal gets into a supplier's or customer's mailbox, or registers a lookalike domain, waits for a real invoice to be due, and then sends a perfectly ordinary-looking email saying the bank details have changed.

It works because nothing looks wrong. The email is in the right thread, uses the right names and refers to a real order. The payment goes out, and nobody notices until the real supplier asks why they haven't been paid. By then the money has usually moved on.

The protection is partly technical and partly a procedure. On the technical side: multi-factor authentication on every mailbox, properly configured email authentication on your own domain so it can't easily be spoofed, and warnings on messages from outside the company. On the procedure side, a simple rule that any change of bank details is confirmed by phone, using a number you already had — never the one in the email. That one rule stops most of these attempts outright.

After the river: keeping photos and records out of the basement

Hurricane Sandy pushed the Raritan into the low-lying parts of Sayreville in 2012, badly enough that a state buyout of flood-prone homes followed, including on Weber and MacArthur Avenues. Anyone who lived through it knows what a flood does to houses. What tends to be underestimated is what it does to the one place where a family's photos, tax records and documents are actually kept.

In a lot of homes that's a single desktop in a basement office, or an external drive next to it — the same room, the same water. Data recovery from a flooded drive is sometimes possible but expensive and never guaranteed.

Keeping a copy somewhere else is now easy and cheap: a cloud photo library and a cloud backup service for the documents, set up once and left running. It protects against the much more common problems too — a failed drive, a stolen laptop, ransomware — and it means the next storm is about the house, not about losing twenty years of pictures.

What we most often help with in Sayreville

• Email security, multi-factor authentication, and domain spoofing protection
• Payment-change verification procedures for accounts payable
• Networks and support for manufacturing and warehouse offices
• Cloud backup for family photos, documents, and records
• Data recovery assessment for failed or water-damaged drives
• Home and small-business computer repair and new-device setup

Areas we cover

We work throughout Sayreville, including Parlin, Morgan, Melrose, Riverton, and Jernee Mill Road.

Getting to you in Sayreville

Sayreville is about twenty to twenty-five minutes from us, so visits are normally scheduled rather than same-day. Email security and account problems can usually be worked on remotely straight away, which matters when a suspicious payment request is sitting in someone's inbox. For industrial and warehouse sites, we can work around shift times.

Common questions from Sayreville

• A supplier emailed to say their bank details have changed. How do we check?

  Call them, using a phone number you already had on file — not one from the email or its signature. If the change is genuine, they'll confirm it in a minute. If not, you've just avoided the most common way small businesses lose large sums of money. It's worth making this a fixed rule for whoever pays invoices, with no exceptions for urgency.

• Someone sent invoices pretending to be us. How do we stop that?

  Set up email authentication on your domain — SPF, DKIM and DMARC. They're DNS records that tell other mail servers which senders are genuinely allowed to send as you, and with DMARC properly enforced, many forged messages get rejected or sent to spam. It doesn't stop lookalike domains, so it's also worth letting your customers know you'll never change bank details by email alone.

• Our computer got wet in a flood. Can the files be recovered?

  Sometimes. Don't turn it on — powering a wet drive is the most likely way to make recovery impossible. Leave it unplugged and get it assessed. Drives that use solid-state storage and mechanical drives fail differently, and some recoveries need a specialist lab, which is expensive. We'll tell you honestly whether it's worth attempting before anything costs real money.

• Do you cover Parlin and Morgan, or just Sayreville proper?

  All of it — Parlin, Morgan, Melrose and the rest of the borough. Parlin addresses can also extend into Old Bridge, which we cover too. Tell us your street when you call and we'll give you a realistic time.