Computer Security News and Insights
The Breach That Started With a Single Browser Extension In early 2024, a data breach at a mid-size healthcare firm started not with some sophisticated zero-day exploit, but with a Chrome extension an employee installed to manage their tabs. That extension harvested saved passwords, session cookies, and browser history. Within
The Email That Cost One Company $100 Million In 2019, Toyota Boshoku Corporation lost $37 million in a single business email compromise attack. A threat actor impersonated a senior executive, convinced a finance employee to change wire transfer details, and the money vanished. That attack started with something deceptively simple
A Castle With No Walls Left to Defend In January 2024, Microsoft disclosed that the Russian threat actor Midnight Blizzard had compromised executive email accounts — not by breaching a firewall, but by password-spraying a legacy test tenant account that lacked multi-factor authentication. The attackers moved laterally for weeks before detection.
A Single Click Cost Change Healthcare $22 Million in Ransom In February 2024, the BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware group crippled Change Healthcare — a company processing roughly one-third of all U.S. health claims. UnitedHealth Group confirmed paying a $22 million ransom. Patient data for over 100 million individuals was compromised. The
In April 2024, researchers at Akamai discovered a massive DNS hijacking campaign targeting financial institutions across Southeast Asia. Attackers poisoned DNS caches at the ISP level, silently redirecting thousands of banking customers to pixel-perfect phishing sites. Victims entered their credentials on pages that looked identical to their bank's
The Breach That Exposed a Missing Playbook In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a social engineering attack gave threat actors access to critical systems. The attackers called the help desk, impersonated an employee, and got in. What made the damage so severe wasn't just
One Employee Stole Data. The Other Just Clicked a Link. Both Cost Millions. In 2022, a former Amazon employee was convicted for her role in the Capital One breach that exposed over 100 million customer records. That same year, the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that 82% of breaches
The Framework Everyone References but Few Actually Implement In 2023, the MOVEit Transfer breach ripped through over 2,600 organizations worldwide. Many of those companies had compliance checklists. Many referenced NIST standards in their security policies. And yet, basic access controls and patch management — core tenets of NIST guidance — were
In March 2024, a finance employee at a multinational firm wired $25 million to threat actors after a deepfake video call that impersonated the company's CFO. The attack started with a single phishing email. That one message opened the door to a loss most companies would never recover
The $350 Million Typo in Verizon's Yahoo Deal When Verizon acquired Yahoo in 2017, the discovery of two massive data breaches — affecting all 3 billion Yahoo accounts — knocked $350 million off the purchase price. That's not a rounding error. That's what happens when cybersecurity
