Computer Security News and Insights
In 2024, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 298,000 phishing complaints — making it the most reported cybercrime category for the fifth consecutive year. Despite billions spent on security tools, phishing remains the number one way threat actors break into organizations. So let's actually
A Fortune 500 company ran the same annual compliance training for three straight years. Completion rates hovered around 92%. Their phishing click rate? Stubbornly stuck at 31%. Then they switched to a gamified approach — leaderboards, scenario-based challenges, real-time feedback. Within six months, that click rate dropped to 11%. Cybersecurity gamification
In early 2024, Change Healthcare — one of the largest health payment processors in the United States — was brought to its knees by the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group. The initial entry point? A Citrix remote access portal without multi-factor authentication. That single vulnerability led to the exfiltration of data affecting roughly
The Credential Theft Problem Nobody Takes Seriously Enough In January 2024, a massive credential dump called "Naz.API" exposed over 70 million unique email addresses and passwords harvested from stealer malware and credential-stuffing operations. Most of those credentials worked because the victims reused passwords across multiple services. I&
82% of Phishing Sites Now Target Mobile Devices In 2024, Zimperium's Global Mobile Threat Report found that 82% of phishing sites specifically targeted mobile devices. That number didn't surprise me. What surprised me was how many security teams I spoke with still treated mobile phishing attacks
The Average Company Uses 130 SaaS Apps — And Secures Maybe Half When I audited a mid-size financial services firm last year, they believed they had about 40 SaaS applications in production. The real number was 187. Over half were adopted by individual departments without IT's knowledge. Three of
A $1.3 Million Fine for Skipping Training In 2023, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services fined Lafourche Medical Group $480,000 after a phishing attack compromised nearly 35,000 patient records. The investigation didn't just find a technical failure — it found the practice had
The CEO Who Wired $47 Million to a Stranger In 2016, FACC, an Austrian aerospace parts manufacturer, lost €42 million (roughly $47 million) after a threat actor impersonated the company's CEO via email and instructed an employee to wire funds for a fake acquisition project. The CEO and
In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 298,000 phishing complaints — more than any other cybercrime category. That number has only climbed since. I've investigated breaches at organizations of every size, and the entry point is almost always the same: one employee who
Your Employees Typed the Right URL — And Still Got Hacked In April 2022, researchers at Avast documented a campaign where a threat actor compromised home routers and used DNS hijacking to redirect users from legitimate banking sites to pixel-perfect phishing clones. Victims typed the correct URL into their browser. Their
