In April 2021, the FBI's IC3 reported that losses from internet crime topped $4.2 billion in 2020 — and a growing share of those incidents started on a mobile device. Not a server. Not a laptop in a locked office. A phone sitting in someone's pocket
Your Employees' Phones Are the Weakest Link Right Now In September 2021, Lookout reported that mobile phishing attacks had surged 161% since 2020. That's not a typo. The device your employees carry everywhere — the one they check 96 times a day — has become the primary attack surface
A Parking Lot Full of Malware In 2016, researchers at the University of Illinois dropped 297 USB drives across a campus. Nearly 48% were picked up and plugged into a computer. Some were plugged in within six minutes of being dropped. That study still haunts me because the fundamental behavior
A USB Drive in a Parking Lot Changed Everything In 2020, a Tesla employee was approached by a Russian national who offered him $1 million to plant malware inside the company's Nevada Gigafactory. The FBI arrested the threat actor before the attack succeeded, but the plan hinged on
In September 2019, a Chinese national named Yujing Zhang walked past security at Mar-a-Lago carrying a thumb drive loaded with malware. She told the front desk she was there to use the pool. That's tailgating — and it nearly compromised one of the most secured private facilities in the
A $10 Pair of Binoculars Can Beat Your $10 Million Security Budget In 2018, a researcher at a security conference demonstrated how he captured over 100 passwords simply by watching people type at airport gates and coffee shops over a two-week period. No malware. No phishing emails. No zero-day exploits.
In March 2021, a UK-based financial firm was fined after a visitor photographed sensitive client data sitting on an employee's desk — in plain sight, during a routine office tour. No hacking tools. No zero-day exploit. Just a smartphone camera and a messy workstation. That's the reality
The Breach That Started with a Single Employee In May 2021, a single compromised password shut down Colonial Pipeline and triggered fuel shortages across the Eastern United States. The credential was tied to a legacy VPN account that lacked multi-factor authentication. One employee. One password. $4.4 million in ransom
A $4.24 Million Wake-Up Call IBM's 2021 Cost of a Data Breach Report found the average breach now costs $4.24 million — the highest in the report's 17-year history. But here's the number that keeps me up at night: 85% of breaches involved
In 2020, a mid-sized healthcare provider invested $250,000 in a security awareness program. Twelve months later, the CISO couldn't answer one question from the board: "Is it working?" No baseline measurements. No tracking. No defensible data. That CISO is now updating a résumé. I'
