Why I built a free cyber security check for businesses and charities
I have spent much of my working life around organisations that are doing important work without an enormous technology team behind them.
Small businesses, schools, churches, charities and community organisations carry an extraordinary amount of trust. They hold personal information, receive donations and payments, coordinate staff and volunteers, support families, and depend on email every day. Yet their website, domain and mail systems may have been set up years ago by a provider, staff member or volunteer who has long since moved on.
That does not mean anybody failed. It means technology keeps moving after the original project is finished.
This is why I built the new free cyber security check from Suburban Secure.
It is free, instant and requires no signup. A business or charity can enter its details and receive a plain-English snapshot of the public signals around its email, DNS and website security. The most confronting question it helps answer is also one of the simplest:
Can somebody already send an email that looks like it came from us?
I wanted to make the first step easier
Cyber security advice often begins in the wrong place. It can begin with fear, unexplained acronyms or a long sales process before an organisation has received anything useful.
I wanted this to begin with value.
The check looks at publicly visible signals including SPF, DMARC and DKIM email authentication, DNS and domain control, website HTTPS and certificate health, reverse DNS, and public spam blocklists. It presents the result immediately and explains it for an owner, manager, board member, treasurer or volunteer leader—not only for an IT specialist.
There is no account to create and no obligation hidden behind the result. You can also request an emailed report link to share with the people who need to see it.
Both paths run the same underlying public-signal check. The charity path simply makes it easier to find an organisation by its ABN or ACNC-listed name, while the business path lets you enter the business and domain directly.
This comes from experience, not a marketing exercise
My passion for this work comes from seeing how deeply technology and trust are connected.
Across local IT support, education technology, infrastructure leadership, community governance and volunteer service, I have seen systems become critical one small decision at a time. Email becomes the organisation’s identity. A domain becomes the key to its public reputation. Cloud storage becomes its filing cabinet. The website becomes the place people decide whether the organisation is genuine.
I have also seen how hard it is for a leader to know what question to ask. They may have paid someone to set everything up properly—and it may well have been properly configured at the time. But suppliers change, staff leave, records drift, certificates lapse and recommended protections improve. Security can decay quietly without anybody doing anything obviously wrong.
The free check exists to make that quiet risk visible before it becomes an impersonation scam, a lost opportunity, an urgent outage or a crisis for a volunteer board.
A genuine starting point, with honest limits
This is not a penetration test or a vulnerability assessment. It uses public records and public DNS, email and website signals. It cannot tell whether every administrator uses multi-factor authentication, whether backups can be restored, whether former staff still have access, or whether a vendor handover was documented properly.
I think being clear about those limits matters.
The check is designed to answer useful first questions, identify visible warning signs and give an organisation somewhere sensible to begin. If it finds something worth fixing, Suburban Secure can help interpret it and work through the next steps. If it gives a leadership team the confidence to ask better questions of its existing provider, that is valuable too.
The practical foundations remain the same ones emphasised in Australian cyber security guidance: use multi-factor authentication, keep systems updated, back up important data, control access, and understand what your public domain and email configuration are telling the world.
Why make it free?
Because the organisations most likely to put off a security conversation are often the ones that need an accessible first step.
A small charity should not need a technical vocabulary or a procurement process just to learn whether its domain has a visible email-spoofing weakness. A business owner should not have to wonder whether asking a question will immediately trigger a sales pitch. A treasurer or board member should be able to bring a clear result into the next meeting.
I built this because practical cyber security should be understandable, honest and useful. It should respect the work people are already doing and help them protect it.
If you run a business, charity or not-for-profit, take a few minutes and run the check today:
Run the free Suburban Secure cyber security check
It may confirm that important protections are already in place. It may uncover something that deserves attention. Either way, you will know more than you did before—and that is a much better place to start.