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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A Single Exposed RDP Port Cost One Hospital Everything In 2023, a regional hospital in Illinois discovered that attackers had been inside their network for over three weeks. The entry point? A single Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) port left open to the internet. The threat actors used brute-forced credentials to
The Misconfigured Bucket That Exposed 540 Million Records In 2019, researchers at UpGuard discovered that Facebook app developers had stored hundreds of millions of user records in Amazon S3 buckets with public access enabled. No hacking. No zero-day exploit. Just a misconfiguration checkbox that nobody reviewed. That single oversight sits
The Misconfiguration That Exposed 100 Million Records In 2019, Capital One learned the hard way that a single misconfigured web application firewall in AWS could expose the personal data of over 100 million customers. The breach cost the company more than $270 million in fines and remediation. That incident wasn&
82% of Phishing Sites Now Target Mobile Devices In late 2024, a wave of toll-road smishing texts hit millions of Americans. The messages claimed unpaid tolls from agencies like E-ZPass and SunPass, directing victims to pixel-perfect payment pages optimized for mobile screens. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center
A former employee at a financial services firm in Chicago watched his coworker type her password every morning for two weeks. He memorized it character by character. After he was terminated for performance issues, he used those stolen credentials to access the company's client database from a public
Your Employees' Passwords Are Already for Sale In March 2024, a single dark web marketplace listed over 10 billion stolen credentials. That's not a typo. The Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report found that stolen credentials were involved in roughly 31% of all breaches over the past
Your Stolen Password Is Probably Already There In 2024, a single dark web marketplace called BreachForums was seized by the FBI — and then resurrected by its users within two weeks. That tells you everything about the persistence of the underground economy. If you've ever wondered what is the
In May 2024, the FBI and international partners seized BreachForums — one of the largest marketplaces where stolen credentials on the dark web were bought and sold in bulk. The forum had facilitated the sale of billions of compromised records, including credentials tied to U.S. government agencies, healthcare organizations, and
In January 2024, Roku disclosed that a credential stuffing attack compromised roughly 591,000 user accounts across two separate incidents. Attackers didn't hack Roku's servers. They simply took username-and-password pairs leaked from other breaches and tried them at scale. It worked because hundreds of thousands of
A 22-Character Password Cracked in Under 4 Hours In 2023, a security researcher demonstrated that a 22-character password using only lowercase letters could be brute-forced in under four hours on consumer-grade GPU hardware. That wasn't a theoretical exercise — it was a wake-up call. Brute force attack prevention isn&
