In January 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice charged a former Twitter employee with spying for Saudi Arabia — accessing the personal data of dissidents and handing it to foreign intelligence. He'd worked at the company for years. Passed background checks. Sat in meetings. Nobody flagged a thing
In January 2023, T-Mobile disclosed that a threat actor had been siphoning data from 37 million customer accounts since November 2022 — through a single exploited API. The attacker moved laterally for weeks without triggering alarms. If you've ever wondered what is zero trust and why the entire industry
The VPN Is Dead. The Breach That Proved It. In May 2023, a threat actor used stolen VPN credentials to breach a major U.S. government contractor, moving laterally across the network for weeks before detection. The attacker didn't exploit some exotic zero-day. They logged in with a
The Breach That Proved Perimeter Security Is Dead In January 2023, T-Mobile disclosed that a threat actor had been siphoning data from 37 million customer accounts since late November 2022 — by exploiting a single API. The attacker was already inside the network, moving laterally, harvesting names, emails, phone numbers, and
Your Remote Workforce Is Your Largest Attack Surface In March 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported that losses from cybercrime exceeded $10.3 billion in 2022 — a 49% increase from the year before. A massive chunk of those losses traced back to compromised remote workers.
In August 2023, a single remote employee at a casino and entertainment company fell for a social engineering call. That one mistake gave threat actors the keys to MGM Resorts' entire kingdom — an attack that cost the company over $100 million in damages according to their SEC filing. The
In May 2023, Barracuda Networks disclosed that a zero-day vulnerability in its VPN appliances had been actively exploited since October 2022 — giving threat actors seven months of undetected access to customer networks. CISA issued an emergency directive. The patch wasn't enough; Barracuda told customers to physically replace compromised
In September 2023, the FBI and CISA issued a joint advisory warning that the Play ransomware group had compromised over 300 organizations — and their most common initial access vector was exposed Remote Desktop Protocol. That's not a sophisticated zero-day exploit. That's a login screen sitting wide
In March 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise alone cost organizations $2.7 billion in 2022 — and the vast majority of those losses started with a single employee clicking, replying, or trusting the wrong message. I've reviewed dozens of incident
In 2022, a single employee at Uber received a flood of multi-factor authentication push notifications, got frustrated, and approved one. That decision gave a teenage threat actor access to Uber's internal systems, Slack, and cloud infrastructure. An acceptable use policy cybersecurity framework — one that specifically addressed MFA fatigue
