Computer Security News and Insights
That "Harmless" Toolbar Was Anything But A few years back, I helped a small accounting firm figure out why their machines had slowed to a crawl every March — right when they needed them most. The culprit? A browser toolbar that one employee had installed, thinking it was a
In March 2024, a finance employee at a Hong Kong multinational wired $25 million to threat actors after a single phishing email led to a deepfake video call with what appeared to be the company's CFO. That's not a Hollywood plot — it's a police-confirmed
The Breach That Nearly Killed a Children's Charity In 2023, Save the Children International confirmed a cyberattack by the BianLian ransomware group that reportedly compromised nearly 7 GB of sensitive data — including financial records, health data, and personal information. A global nonprofit with dedicated IT resources still got
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost roughly $100 million after a social engineering phone call lasting just ten minutes gave a threat actor access to internal systems. The attackers didn't exploit some exotic zero-day vulnerability. They manipulated a help desk employee. If your cyber security definition starts and stops
A Single Employee Click Cost One Hospital $10 Million In 2024, Change Healthcare suffered one of the most devastating ransomware attacks in U.S. history. The breach disrupted pharmacy systems, delayed patient care nationwide, and cost UnitedHealth Group over $870 million in the first quarter alone. The root cause? Compromised
Two Trusted Brands, One Devastating Scam In late 2024, security researchers at Avanan documented a surge in phishing campaigns that combined PayPal and DocuSign branding in a single attack chain. The attackers sent emails that appeared to come from DocuSign, notifying the recipient of a payment document waiting for their
In 2024, Verizon's Data Breach Investigations Report found that email was the initial attack vector in roughly 25% of all confirmed data breaches. Not novel zero-days. Not sophisticated nation-state implants. Spam email — the oldest trick in the book — still opens the door for threat actors more than any
The Phone Call That Cost One Company $25 Million In early 2024, a finance worker at engineering firm Arup was tricked into transferring $25 million after a video call with what appeared to be the company's CFO. Every person on that call was a deepfake. The attackers never
A Single Fake Identity Website Cost One Company $23 Million In early 2024, a finance employee at Arup, a British engineering firm, was tricked into transferring approximately $25 million after threat actors used a deepfake video call combined with a fake identity website that impersonated senior executives. The site looked
In 2022, a former Amazon engineer named Paige Thompson was convicted for the Capital One breach that exposed over 100 million customer records. She wasn't an outside hacker who cracked through a firewall. She was an insider — someone with knowledge of the cloud infrastructure who exploited a misconfigured
