Computer Security News and Insights
In 2024, the average cost of a data breach hit $4.88 million according to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report. That number keeps climbing. And after two decades in this field, I can tell you that most of those breaches didn't involve some sophisticated
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a social engineering attack that started with a single phone call to their help desk. The threat actor impersonated an employee, gained access to internal systems, and deployed ransomware across the enterprise. The entire operation took roughly 10 minutes to
One Reused Password Cost This Company $10 Million In 2024, the Snowflake customer breach wave compromised over 165 organizations — including Ticketmaster and AT&T — because attackers used stolen credentials harvested from infostealer malware. The common thread? Employees reusing passwords across personal and corporate accounts with no password manager in
A Single Misconfigured S3 Bucket Cost Capital One $80 Million Back in 2019, a former AWS employee exploited a misconfigured web application firewall to access over 100 million Capital One customer records. The bank ultimately paid an $80 million fine to the OCC. That breach didn't happen because
A Six-Figure Salary With No Degree — and a $80K Debt With One I recently spoke with two cybersecurity analysts at the same company. One had an online computer security degree and $78,000 in student loans. The other had no degree, a handful of certifications, and a home lab built
The Breach That Exposed 147 Million People — And a Broken Response When Equifax disclosed its 2017 breach, the technical failure got the headlines. But the real catastrophe was the response. Weeks of delay, a phishing-prone notification website, and executives who dumped stock before the public announcement. The company eventually paid
A Single Checkbox Left 540 Million Facebook Records Exposed Back in 2019, researchers at UpGuard discovered that two third-party Facebook app developers had stored more than 540 million user records on Amazon S3 buckets with no access restrictions. Not encrypted. Not firewalled. Just sitting there, publicly readable, because someone didn&
The Threat Already Inside Your Network In 2023, Tesla disclosed that two former employees had leaked the personal data of over 75,000 workers to a foreign media outlet. It wasn't a sophisticated nation-state hack. It wasn't a zero-day exploit. It was two people with legitimate
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost roughly $100 million after a threat actor social-engineered their way past the help desk with a single phone call. The attackers didn't exploit a zero-day vulnerability. They didn't write custom malware. They called an employee, pretended to be someone from IT,
The Hiring Manager Who Ignored Every Applicant's Diploma A few years ago, I sat in on a hiring panel for a mid-level SOC analyst position. The hiring manager tossed a stack of resumes on the table and said, "I don't care what school any of
