The Breach Bill Nobody Budgets For IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report put the global average at $4.88 million — a 10% jump from the prior year and the highest figure ever recorded. If you think 2026 will somehow reverse that trend, I've got
In 2023, the FBI's IC3 reported over $5.6 billion in losses from phishing and its variants — and smishing, the SMS-based cousin, drove a massive chunk of that number. I've watched smishing evolve from clumsy "you won a prize" texts into sophisticated, multi-step social
In January 2024, a finance employee at a multinational firm in Hong Kong wired $25.6 million to criminals after a video call with what appeared to be the company's CFO. Every person on that call was a deepfake. The attack started with a single phishing email. If
The Invoice That Took Down a Hospital Network In 2023, a hospital system in Illinois watched helplessly as Qakbot — a trojan horse malware strain — moved laterally through its entire Active Directory environment in under four hours. The initial infection? A single employee opened what looked like an overdue vendor invoice
A Single Misconfigured Bucket Exposed 3 Billion Records In 2021, Cognyte left an unsecured database containing over 5 billion records — scraped from previous breaches — sitting in a cloud storage instance with no authentication required. Anyone with a browser could reach it. That's not a sophisticated nation-state attack. That&
In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 40,000 complaints related to spoofing, with losses exceeding $300 million. That number keeps climbing. A spoofing caller attack — where a threat actor manipulates the caller ID to impersonate a trusted number — is one of the oldest tricks
The Breach That Cost a Children's Charity Everything In 2023, Save the Children Federation disclosed it had been hit by the BianLian ransomware gang, which claimed to have stolen nearly 7 GB of sensitive data including financial records, medical information, and personal data. A global nonprofit with significant
A Single Click Cost One Hospital Chain $100 Million In 2024, Change Healthcare — the payment processing backbone of the U.S. healthcare system — was crippled by a ransomware attack attributed to the ALPHV/BlackCat group. UnitedHealth Group, its parent company, disclosed the incident would cost over $870 million in direct
The Breach That Didn't Start With You In early 2024, a massive data breach at Change Healthcare — a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group — disrupted the entire U.S. healthcare payment system for weeks. The root cause? A threat actor exploited compromised credentials on a remote access portal that lacked
October Comes and Goes — Breaches Don't Every October, organizations dust off the same tired PowerPoint decks, send a few reminder emails about password hygiene, and pat themselves on the back for "participating" in Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Then November arrives, an employee clicks a credential-harvesting link, and
