Carl B. Johnson
Author

Carl B. Johnson

vCISO and compliance expert.

https://carlbjohnson.com

posts

NIST Cybersecurity Framework

NIST Cybersecurity Framework: A Practical Guide for 2023

The Framework That Could Have Prevented a $150 Million Mistake When Equifax disclosed its catastrophic 2017 breach affecting 147 million Americans, the postmortem was brutal. The company had failed at the most basic elements of what the NIST Cybersecurity Framework prescribes: asset inventory, patch management, and network segmentation. The FTC

Carl B. Johnson Nov 09, 2023 7 min read
Cybersecurity for Healthcare

Cybersecurity for Healthcare Organizations: A Field Guide

In October 2023, the healthcare sector reported more data breaches than any other industry — again. Prospect Medical Holdings was still recovering from an August ransomware attack that forced hospitals across four states to divert ambulances and revert to paper records. CommonSpirit Health's 2022 breach affected over 600,000

Carl B. Johnson Nov 09, 2023 7 min read
Cybersecurity for Financial Services

Cybersecurity for Financial Services: A Survival Guide

The Industry That Gets Hit Hardest — and Most Often In January 2023, ION Trading Technologies — a critical software vendor serving derivatives traders worldwide — got hit with a LockBit ransomware attack that forced dozens of financial institutions back to manual trade processing. For days. In one of the most automated industries

Carl B. Johnson Nov 09, 2023 8 min read
Cybersecurity for Nonprofits

Cybersecurity for Nonprofits: A Survival Guide for 2024

In July 2023, a ransomware attack crippled the nonprofit hospital chain CommonSpirit Health, ultimately affecting over 600,000 patients and costing the organization an estimated $160 million. That's not a Fortune 500 company. That's a mission-driven organization built to serve communities — brought to its knees because

Carl B. Johnson Nov 09, 2023 7 min read
Cloud Security Best Practices

Cloud Security Best Practices That Actually Stop Breaches

A Single Misconfigured S3 Bucket Exposed 3 Billion Records In early 2023, independent security researchers discovered yet another wave of publicly exposed Amazon S3 buckets leaking sensitive customer data — healthcare records, financial documents, personally identifiable information. None of these organizations were hacked in the traditional sense. They simply got their

Carl B. Johnson Nov 03, 2023 7 min read
Cloud Storage Security Risks

Cloud Storage Security Risks: What Your Team Ignores

A Single Misconfigured S3 Bucket Exposed 3 Billion Records In early 2023, security researchers discovered that a misconfigured cloud storage instance at Toyota had been leaking vehicle location data for over a decade — affecting 2.15 million customers. That wasn't a sophisticated nation-state attack. It was a configuration

Carl B. Johnson Nov 03, 2023 7 min read
Securing Cloud Applications

Securing Cloud Applications: A Practical Field Guide

The $65 Million Misconfiguration Nobody Saw Coming In March 2023, Toyota disclosed that a cloud misconfiguration had exposed vehicle data on 2.15 million customers for over a decade. A single cloud storage bucket, left publicly accessible, quietly leaked data from 2012 to 2023. Nobody noticed for ten years. That&

Carl B. Johnson Nov 03, 2023 7 min read