Computer Security News and Insights
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a social engineering attack that started with a single phone call to an IT help desk. The threat actor impersonated an employee, convinced a technician to reset credentials, and within hours had deployed ransomware across critical systems. Slot machines went
The Breach That Took 277 Days to Find According to IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average time to identify and contain a data breach was 258 days. That number has barely improved in years. I've worked with organizations that discovered threat actors
A Single Stolen Password Started a $4.4 Billion Problem In May 2021, a single compromised password shut down the Colonial Pipeline — the largest fuel pipeline in the United States. Fuel shortages hit the East Coast. Panic buying emptied gas stations across multiple states. The company paid a $4.4
The Breach That Nobody Reported — Until It Was Too Late In 2023, a mid-size healthcare provider in the Midwest discovered suspicious network activity on a Friday afternoon. The IT manager flagged it internally but didn't report it externally. By Monday morning, threat actors had exfiltrated 1.4 million
The Threat Already Inside Your Building In January 2023, the FBI arrested a former GE Aviation employee who had spent years downloading thousands of proprietary turbine technology files and transferring trade secrets to a competing business in China. The insider had legitimate access. He passed every background check. He sat
The Threat Already Inside Your Building In 2022, a former employee at Cash App's parent company, Block, downloaded reports containing the personal information of 8.2 million customers — months after leaving the company. Block disclosed the breach in an SEC filing, and lawsuits followed. The attacker didn'
In 2022, a former employee at Cash App's parent company, Block Inc., downloaded reports containing the personal information of over 8 million customers — months after they'd left the company. The access was never revoked. No alarm was triggered. The breach wasn't discovered until the
One Employee Stole Data for Profit. The Other Just Clicked the Wrong Link. In 2022, a former employee of a major healthcare organization was sentenced to federal prison for stealing patient records and selling them. That same year, the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that 82% of breaches involved
The Breach That Came From the Inside In 2022, a former Twitter employee was convicted of spying on behalf of Saudi Arabia, accessing the personal data of dissidents using nothing more than his legitimate credentials. No malware. No phishing email. Just an insider with access and motive. That case made
The Breach That Proved Perimeters Don't Work In 2020, the SolarWinds breach gave roughly 18,000 organizations a brutal lesson: once a threat actor gets past your perimeter, they can move laterally for months without detection. Government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and critical infrastructure providers all had firewalls.
