Posts exploring how attackers steal usernames, passwords, and authentication tokens through phishing, keylogging, brute force attacks, and credential stuffing. Includes actionable guidance on multi-factor authentication, password managers, and monitoring for compromised credentials.
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In February 2025, a finance employee at a Hong Kong multinational wired $25 million to threat actors after a deepfake video call impersonating the company's CFO. That single incident captures the state of social engineering attacks right now: they're sophisticated, they exploit trust instead of technology,
In September 2023, a threat actor called Scattered Spider called MGM Resorts' IT help desk, impersonated an employee they found on LinkedIn, and convinced a technician to reset credentials. The result: an estimated $100 million in losses, a ransomware lockout across casino floors and hotel systems, and weeks of
In January 2024, a finance employee at engineering firm Arup wired $25 million to threat actors after joining a video call with what appeared to be the company's CFO and other colleagues. Every person on that call was a deepfake. The attackers never exploited a software vulnerability. They
In February 2024, Change Healthcare — the payment processor handling roughly one-third of all U.S. medical claims — was hit by the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group. The result: $872 million in direct costs reported by UnitedHealth Group, months of disrupted pharmacy operations, and the personal health data of over 100 million
In May 2024, Ticketmaster disclosed a breach that exposed personal data on over 560 million customers. The attack vector? Compromised credentials at a third-party cloud provider. No zero-day exploit. No nation-state wizardry. Just stolen login details and a lack of proper access controls. Data breach prevention doesn't start
In May 2024, Ticketmaster confirmed a breach that exposed the personal data of over 560 million customers. The attack vector? Stolen credentials used to access a third-party cloud database. It wasn't some exotic zero-day exploit. It was a login and password that fell into the wrong hands. If
The 23-Character Password That Still Got Cracked In 2024, a security researcher at Hive Systems demonstrated that a 12-character password using only lowercase letters could be brute-forced in about three weeks with modern GPU hardware. Bump that up to a complex 12-character mix of upper, lower, numbers, and symbols? Still
In January 2024, a threat actor compromised a Microsoft corporate email system by spraying passwords against a legacy test tenant account that lacked multi-factor authentication. The attackers — identified as the Russian-linked group Midnight Blizzard — spent weeks inside executive mailboxes before anyone noticed. One account. No MFA. That's all
The Breach That Started With "CompanyName2024!" In January 2025, a mid-size healthcare provider in the Midwest discovered that an attacker had been living inside their network for eleven weeks. The initial access point? A reused password. An employee had used the same credential for their company email and
The Breach That Started With "Spring2024!" In early 2024, a midsize healthcare company in the Midwest 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
