Carl B. Johnson
Author

Carl B. Johnson

vCISO and compliance expert.

https://carlbjohnson.com

posts

Phishing

Phish: Why Employees Still Take the Bait in 2022

A Single Phish Cost Twilio 163 Million User Records In August 2022, Twilio — a company that powers authentication for thousands of apps — confirmed that attackers used SMS-based phishing to compromise employee credentials. That single phish gave threat actors access to data from 163 customer accounts, which cascaded into a breach

Carl B. Johnson Dec 25, 2022 6 min read
Fake Email

Fake Email: How to Spot It Before It Costs You

In March 2022, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that Business Email Compromise — attacks built on a single convincing fake email — caused $2.4 billion in adjusted losses in 2021 alone. That made it the most financially devastating cybercrime category in the entire FBI IC3 annual report.

Carl B. Johnson Dec 25, 2022 6 min read
Phishing

Phishing in 2022: What Actually Works to Stop It

Twilio disclosed in August that a phishing campaign tricked its employees into handing over credentials via SMS, exposing data tied to over 130 organizations — including Signal users. A few weeks later, Uber suffered a breach when an attacker used social engineering to fatigue an employee with multi-factor authentication push requests

Carl B. Johnson Dec 18, 2022 6 min read
Smishing

FBI Warning on Smishing Texts: How to Protect Yourself

In early 2022, the FBI issued a stark warning: cybercriminals were registering over 10,000 malicious domains specifically designed to support SMS phishing — or "smishing" — campaigns targeting American consumers. These weren't sloppy, typo-filled messages from a decade ago. They were polished, urgent, and devastatingly effective. The

Carl B. Johnson Dec 18, 2022 6 min read
Phishing Simulation

Phish Setlist for Security: Building Your Attack Plan

Why Every Security Team Needs a Phish Setlist In March 2022, Okta confirmed that the Lapsus$ threat actor group breached a third-party support engineer's account — and a big part of that attack chain started with social engineering. A single compromised credential. One phishing message that worked. That'

Carl B. Johnson Nov 21, 2022 7 min read
Phish Tour

Phish Tour: Simulated Attacks That Train Your Team

One Clicked Link Cost This Company Everything In September 2022, a single employee at Uber clicked a link in a social engineering attack. The threat actor, reportedly affiliated with Lapsus$, used that foothold to access internal systems, Slack channels, and cloud infrastructure. The breach made global headlines — not because Uber&

Carl B. Johnson Nov 21, 2022 7 min read
Phishing Definition

Phishing Definition: What It Really Means in 2022

Twilio, a company with a sophisticated security team and a tech-savvy workforce, got phished in August 2022. Attackers sent SMS messages to employees pretending to be the IT department, directing them to a fake login page. The result: compromised credentials, unauthorized access to customer data, and a breach that rippled

Carl B. Johnson Nov 21, 2022 6 min read
Phishing Definition

Definition of a Phishing Attack: What It Really Looks Like

In March 2022, the hacking group Lapsus$ breached Okta by phishing a single contractor's credentials. That one successful social engineering attack gave threat actors access to systems used by thousands of companies worldwide. If you're searching for the definition of a phishing attack, that incident is

Carl B. Johnson Oct 24, 2022 7 min read
Spoofing

Spoofing Attacks: How Hackers Impersonate Your Trust

In March 2022, the FBI warned that business email compromise schemes — many of which rely heavily on spoofing — had caused over $43 billion in global losses since 2016. That's not a typo. Forty-three billion. And the most unsettling part? The attacks didn't require elite hacking skills.

Carl B. Johnson Oct 24, 2022 7 min read