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Data Breach Response Plan

Data Breach Response Plan: What Actually Works in 2025

In May 2023, MOVEit Transfer suffered a mass exploitation that ultimately affected over 2,700 organizations and exposed data on roughly 95 million individuals. Some of those organizations had a tested data breach response plan ready to execute. Most didn't. The difference between the two groups wasn'

Carl B. Johnson Jul 15, 2025 7 min read
Data Breach Reporting

How to Report a Data Breach: A Step-by-Step Guide

In February 2024, Change Healthcare suffered a ransomware attack that exposed the protected health information of approximately 190 million people — making it the largest healthcare data breach in U.S. history. The fallout wasn't just the breach itself. It was the weeks of confusion about who had been

Carl B. Johnson Jul 15, 2025 8 min read
Data Breach Notification Requirements

Data Breach Notification Requirements: A 2025 Guide

In May 2023, T-Mobile agreed to a $350 million settlement after a data breach exposed the personal information of roughly 76 million people. A significant chunk of that cost wasn't the breach itself — it was the fallout from notification failures, regulatory scrutiny, and class-action lawsuits that followed. If

Carl B. Johnson Jun 15, 2025 8 min read
Password Security Best Practices

Password Security Best Practices That Actually Work

The Breach That Started With a Single Reused Password In January 2024, a credential stuffing attack hit genetic testing giant 23andMe, ultimately exposing the personal data of approximately 6.9 million users. The root cause wasn't some exotic zero-day exploit. It was customers reusing passwords they'd

Carl B. Johnson Jun 15, 2025 7 min read
Strong Passwords

How to Create a Strong Password That Actually Stops Hackers

The 23-Character Password That Still Got Cracked In 2024, a security researcher at Hive Systems demonstrated that a 12-character password using only lowercase letters could be brute-forced in about three weeks with modern GPU hardware. Bump that up to a complex 12-character mix of upper, lower, numbers, and symbols? Still

Carl B. Johnson Jun 15, 2025 7 min read
Password Manager Benefits

Password Manager Benefits That Stop 80% of Breaches

The Breach That Started With "Company2024!" In January 2024, the password "admin" was still the most common credential found in data breaches according to NordPass research. That same year, the Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report confirmed that stolen credentials were involved in over 77% of

Carl B. Johnson Jun 15, 2025 7 min read
Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-Factor Authentication Setup: A Practical Guide

The Breach That Started With a Single Stolen Password In January 2024, a threat actor used stolen credentials to access a Snowflake customer environment — no malware, no exploit, just a username and password harvested months earlier. The fallout hit Ticketmaster and AT&T, exposing hundreds of millions of records.

Carl B. Johnson Jun 15, 2025 8 min read
Multi-Factor Authentication

MFA vs Two-Factor Authentication: What Really Matters

In March 2024, a threat actor bypassed a major healthcare provider's two-factor authentication by intercepting SMS codes through a SIM-swapping attack — compromising over 2 million patient records. The organization thought they were protected. They had "MFA" checked off on their compliance audit. But they'd

Carl B. Johnson Jun 15, 2025 7 min read