Computer Security News and Insights
The FBI Says Phishing Scams Are the #1 Cybercrime — And It's Not Even Close In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received over 298,000 complaints about phishing scams — more than any other cybercrime category. That number has topped the charts for five consecutive
A Bank's Customers Were Logging In — Just Not to the Real Bank In 2017, attackers hijacked DNS records for a major Brazilian bank, redirecting all of its online customers to perfectly cloned phishing sites for roughly five hours. Every login, every transaction, every credential — harvested in real time.
The 10-Billion-Password Wake-Up Call In July 2024, a file called "RockYou2024" appeared on a popular hacking forum containing nearly 10 billion unique plaintext passwords compiled from decades of data breaches. It was the largest credential compilation ever leaked. Within weeks, threat actors were running those passwords against corporate
The Hospital That Lost 133 Days to Ransomware In 2024, Change Healthcare suffered a ransomware attack that disrupted claims processing for thousands of hospitals, pharmacies, and clinics across the United States. UnitedHealth Group, its parent company, disclosed costs exceeding $870 million in the first quarter alone. Patient care was delayed.
In 2024, the average cost of a data breach hit $4.88 million according to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report. That number keeps climbing. And after two decades in this field, I can tell you that most of those breaches didn't involve some sophisticated
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a social engineering attack that started with a single phone call to their help desk. The threat actor impersonated an employee, gained access to internal systems, and deployed ransomware across the enterprise. The entire operation took roughly 10 minutes to
One Reused Password Cost This Company $10 Million In 2024, the Snowflake customer breach wave compromised over 165 organizations — including Ticketmaster and AT&T — because attackers used stolen credentials harvested from infostealer malware. The common thread? Employees reusing passwords across personal and corporate accounts with no password manager in
A Single Misconfigured S3 Bucket Cost Capital One $80 Million Back in 2019, a former AWS employee exploited a misconfigured web application firewall to access over 100 million Capital One customer records. The bank ultimately paid an $80 million fine to the OCC. That breach didn't happen because
A Six-Figure Salary With No Degree — and a $80K Debt With One I recently spoke with two cybersecurity analysts at the same company. One had an online computer security degree and $78,000 in student loans. The other had no degree, a handful of certifications, and a home lab built
The Breach That Exposed 147 Million People — And a Broken Response When Equifax disclosed its 2017 breach, the technical failure got the headlines. But the real catastrophe was the response. Weeks of delay, a phishing-prone notification website, and executives who dumped stock before the public announcement. The company eventually paid
