Computer Security News and Insights
A $1 USB Stick Took Down a Defense Contractor In 2008, a USB flash drive infected with the Agent.BTZ worm was plugged into a U.S. military laptop at a base in the Middle East. That single device triggered what the Pentagon called the most significant breach of U.
In 2019, a penetration tester hired by the state of Iowa walked into a locked courthouse after hours by simply following an employee through a secure door. He was arrested — even though the state had authorized the test. The incident made national headlines and exposed a painful truth: your firewalls,
A few years ago, a journalist filmed himself reading credit card numbers, PINs, and passwords off the screens of commuters on a London train. No malware. No exploit kit. Just a pair of eyes and a decent camera phone. That's a shoulder surfing attack in its simplest form
The Unlocked Filing Cabinet That Cost a Hospital $3 Million In 2019, the Office for Civil Rights fined Bayfront Health St. Petersburg $85,000 for a breach involving paper records left in an unsecured location. That was a small settlement. I've seen organizations lose far more when a
The Breach That Started With a Single Slack Message In September 2022, a threat actor sent a social engineering message to an Uber employee, pretending to be IT support. The employee handed over credentials. Within hours, the attacker had access to internal systems, the company's HackerOne vulnerability reports,
The Breach That Started With a Single Slack Message In September 2022, a threat actor sent a push notification to an Uber contractor's phone — over and over, for more than an hour. The contractor eventually approved the multi-factor authentication request just to make it stop. That single moment
Your Board Doesn't Care About Completion Rates I sat in a boardroom last year where a CISO proudly presented a 97% training completion rate. The CFO's response: "So why did we just pay $2.3 million to recover from a ransomware attack?" That question
Your Training Program Might Be Failing — and You'd Never Know In 2024, IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report pegged the global average breach cost at $4.88 million. Organizations with security awareness training and incident response planning cut that number dramatically. But here's
A 45-Minute Training Video Nobody Watched In 2023, a mid-size healthcare company I consulted for spent $60,000 on a compliance-focused security awareness program. It featured a 45-minute narrated slideshow, a 10-question quiz, and a certificate of completion. Their post-training phishing simulation results? A 31% click rate — virtually unchanged from
A Single Click Cost One Company $100 Million In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a social engineering attack — a threat actor called the help desk, impersonated an employee, and gained access to internal systems. The entire breach hinged on human behavior, not a firewall failure. That
