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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Your Employees' Passwords Are Probably Already There In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 880,000 complaints with potential losses exceeding $12.5 billion — and a significant share of that activity traces back to credentials and data traded on dark web marketplaces. If you&
In January 2024, a massive dataset known as the "Mother of All Breaches" surfaced containing 26 billion records — credentials scraped, aggregated, and repackaged from hundreds of previous data breaches. Usernames. Passwords. Email addresses. All of it sitting on dark web forums, available to anyone willing to pay. If
A Single Password Got Them Into the Colonial Pipeline In May 2021, a single compromised password on an inactive VPN account gave the DarkSide ransomware group access to Colonial Pipeline's network. There was no multi-factor authentication on that account. The attackers didn't need a sophisticated zero-day
A Single Stolen Password Cost One Company $60 Million In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor used social engineering to take over an employee's account through a help desk call. The attackers didn't hack a firewall. They didn't
A Single Stolen W-2 Cost This Company $1.6 Million In 2023, a mid-size manufacturing firm in Ohio lost control of every employee's W-2 data after one payroll clerk fell for a CEO impersonation email. The threat actor filed fraudulent tax returns before anyone noticed. The cleanup — credit
In 2019, Microsoft published a study that changed how I talk to every client about security: enabling multi-factor authentication blocks 99.9% of automated account compromise attacks. That single stat should end every debate about whether two-factor authentication benefits are worth the minor inconvenience. Yet here we are in 2026,
The Fake Invoice That Cost a Hospital System $28 Million In 2024, Ascension Health — one of the largest healthcare systems in the United States — suffered a devastating ransomware attack that disrupted operations across 140 hospitals. The initial entry vector? A malicious file that an employee downloaded, believing it to be
In 2023, the FBI dismantled a cybercrime ring that used a commercial keylogger called Snake Keylogger to steal credentials from over 10,000 victims across 50 countries. The malware recorded every keystroke — banking passwords, email logins, private messages — and quietly exfiltrated the data to attacker-controlled servers. The victims had no
Your Employees Think They're on Your Bank's Website. They're Not. In April 2022, researchers at Avast documented a campaign where threat actors compromised home routers to execute a DNS spoofing attack that redirected users trying to visit legitimate banking sites to near-perfect credential theft
In 2018, British Airways disclosed a breach that exposed the personal and financial data of roughly 380,000 customers. The attack vector? A modified JavaScript injected into the airline's payment page — a textbook cross-site scripting exploit. The UK's Information Commissioner's Office initially proposed a
