MissionDefend publishes practical cybersecurity guidance for churches and nonprofits. The people reading it are pastors, office administrators, treasurers and board members who are making real decisions about real money and real people’s records. That means a wrong number here is not a small thing. This page sets out how the writing is produced, what we will and won’t claim, and how to tell us we got something wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We cite primary sources.<\/strong> When an article gives a figure, that figure comes from the organization that produced it — a government agency, a regulator, a standards body, or the vendor whose product is being described. Not from a summary, not from a news article quoting a report, and not from another blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sources that appear most often are the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the Federal Trade Commission, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the US Postal Inspection Service, the IRS, the Government Accountability Office, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Conference of State Legislatures, and the official product documentation of Microsoft, Google and the platforms churches actually use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every source is linked at the foot of the article that uses it, by name, so you can check it yourself. If a link is missing, that is a defect — tell us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We do not estimate, round up, or repeat a statistic we cannot trace.<\/strong> If a claim would be stronger with a number and we cannot find one in a primary source, the article makes the claim without a number rather than inventing one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Derived figures are shown with their inputs.<\/strong> Some useful numbers are not published anywhere and have to be calculated. When an article says the average reported loss from business email compromise was about $123,005, it also gives you the two published figures it came from — 24,768 complaints and $3,046,598,558 in losses — so you can do the division yourself. Averages presented without their inputs are impossible to check, and we don’t publish them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We do not use statistics as decoration.<\/strong> If a figure does not change what a reader should do, it isn’t in the article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every article goes through a verification pass separate from the drafting. That pass starts from the assumption that each claim is wrong and works to prove it from the cited source: the number is checked against the source document, quotations are checked against the original wording, dates are checked, and every URL is fetched to confirm it resolves and is the document it claims to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not a formality. That pass routinely finds errors, and it has caught mistakes in articles we had already published. When it does, we fix the published article rather than quietly leaving it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We do not give legal advice.<\/strong> Several topics we cover — breach notification, records retention, photo consent, background-check files, employment records — are governed by law that varies by state and by the type and size of the organization. We describe the general shape of the obligation and say plainly when something needs a lawyer licensed in your state. If an article ever reads like legal advice, that is an error.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We do not give tax or insurance advice.<\/strong> Where we describe how a coverage type or an IRS rule generally works, that is background for a conversation with your own broker, accountant or counsel — not a substitute for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MissionDefend is not a penetration test, a security audit, a compliance certification, or an incident response service.<\/strong> It is a readiness assessment and a body of educational material. If your organization needs one of those other things, our guidance will tell you so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nothing in our editorial content is paid for. No vendor, insurer, broker or software company pays to appear in an article, to be recommended, or to be left out. Nobody outside MissionDefend reviews an article before it is published.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where we name a product — a password manager, an email platform, a church management system — it is because the reader is likely already using it and needs to know which setting to change. Those are not endorsements and there are no affiliate arrangements behind them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Insurance Partners<\/strong> category is the one place where commercial relationships may appear in future. Anything in it that involves a commercial relationship will say so, in the article, at the top. It will never be mixed into editorial posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If something here is wrong, we want to know, and we would rather hear it from you than not hear it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Write to contact@missiondefend.com<\/strong> with the article and what you believe is incorrect. You do not need to be certain or to have a source; a note saying “this doesn’t match what my insurer told me” is genuinely useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Substantive errors — a wrong figure, a misstated rule, a control that doesn’t work as described — are corrected in the article itself. When a correction changes the substance of what a reader would do, we note the change at the foot of the article rather than silently editing it. Typos and broken links we simply fix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cybersecurity guidance goes stale in specific, predictable ways: a vendor changes a menu, a free tier stops being free, a reporting agency closes, a law takes effect. We revisit articles when we become aware that something in them has changed, and we would rather remove a section than leave advice that no longer works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are reading an article and a step doesn’t match what you see on your screen, that is worth an email too. It usually means the product changed, and you are not the only person about to hit it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How MissionDefend sources its cybersecurity guidance for churches and nonprofits: primary sources only, derived figures shown with their inputs, an independent verification pass, and how to report an error.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-374","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_hostinger_reach_plugin_has_subscription_block":false,"_hostinger_reach_plugin_is_elementor":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/missiondefend.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/missiondefend.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/missiondefend.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missiondefend.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missiondefend.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/missiondefend.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/missiondefend.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What we do with numbers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Verification<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Where we stop<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Independence<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Corrections<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Updates<\/h2>\n\n\n\n