Computer Security News and Insights
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor called a help desk, impersonated an employee found on LinkedIn, and talked their way into the network. No zero-day exploit. No nation-state tooling. Just a phone call. If you want to understand what causes a data breach,
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor called Scattered Spider social-engineered their way past the help desk with a ten-minute phone call. That single conversation gave attackers the keys to slot machines, hotel room systems, and customer data across an entire casino empire. If
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor called Scattered Spider social-engineered their way past an IT help desk — with a single phone call. That one interaction led to a ransomware attack that shut down slot machines, hotel check-ins, and digital key cards across Las
The Breach That Started With "Company2024!" In January 2024, a mid-size healthcare company lost 2.3 million patient records. The root cause wasn't a sophisticated zero-day exploit. It wasn't a nation-state threat actor. It was an employee who reused the same password across their
The Redundancy in "Computer Security Security" Is the Whole Point When the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack shut down fuel distribution across the U.S. Southeast in 2021, the root cause wasn't exotic. It was a single compromised VPN credential without multi-factor authentication. One layer failed, and
A Single Email Cost This Company $100 Million In 2015, Ubiquiti Networks disclosed that threat actors used carefully crafted emails — impersonating executives — to trick finance employees into wiring $46.7 million to overseas accounts. That wasn't a mass spam campaign. It was spear phishing: a surgical, researched, devastatingly
In March 2024, a Cisco advisory revealed that a massive brute force campaign was targeting VPN devices, SSH services, and web application portals worldwide — using roughly 28,000 unique IP addresses. The attackers weren't sophisticated. They didn't need to be. They just hammered login pages with
A Single Click Cost One Hospital Chain $100 Million In 2024, Change Healthcare — the largest health payment processing company in the U.S. — was hit by the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware gang. The attack disrupted claims processing for thousands of providers nationwide. UnitedHealth Group, Change Healthcare's parent company, disclosed
The CEO Who Wired $47 Million to a Criminal In 2016, Austrian aerospace manufacturer FACC lost €42 million (roughly $47 million) after threat actors spoofed the CEO's email and instructed a finance employee to wire funds for a fake acquisition. The employee believed the request was legitimate. The
A Leaderboard Didn't Stop the Breach — But It Helped In 2023, a midsize healthcare provider ran a standard annual compliance video for security training. Completion rates hit 94%. Two months later, a single employee clicked a phishing link that led to a ransomware attack affecting 130,000 patient
