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.
posts
The CEO Who Wired $47 Million to a Criminal In 2016, Austrian aerospace manufacturer FACC lost €42 million (roughly $47 million) after threat actors spoofed the CEO's email and instructed a finance employee to wire funds for a fake acquisition. The employee believed the request was legitimate. The
A Single Fraud Ring Stole $6 Million Before Anyone Noticed In 2023, the FBI's IC3 received over 880,000 cybercrime complaints with losses exceeding $12.5 billion — a 22% increase from the prior year. A growing share of those losses came from coordinated fraud operations, not lone hackers
A Teenager Breached Uber. No Malware Required. In September 2022, an 18-year-old compromised Uber's internal systems — not with a sophisticated zero-day exploit, but with a text message. The attacker bombarded an Uber contractor with multi-factor authentication push requests until the contractor finally approved one. From there, the threat
In late 2024, security researchers at Avanan documented a surge of phishing campaigns that weaponized legitimate DocuSign and PayPal infrastructure to deliver convincing credential theft attacks. The emails didn't come from spoofed domains. They came from the actual DocuSign and PayPal platforms — which is exactly why they sailed
The Text Message That Cost One Company $15 Million In 2022, threat actors hit Twilio with an SMS-based social engineering attack that compromised employee credentials and exposed data for over 160 customers. The attack didn't involve a sophisticated zero-day exploit. It started with a text message pretending to
Last March, a finance director at a mid-size logistics company wired $2.1 million to a threat actor who had spoofed the CEO's email address. The message looked perfect — right tone, right signature, right sense of urgency. The only thing wrong was the reply-to domain, off by a
That "Unsubscribe" Link Just Installed Malware on Your Network In January 2024, a mid-size accounting firm in Ohio lost access to every client file it had. The entry point wasn't a sophisticated zero-day exploit. It was a single spam email disguised as a shipping notification from
A Single Stolen Password Cost This Company $60 Million In 2023, MGM Resorts International was brought to its knees — not by a sophisticated zero-day exploit, but by a phone call. A threat actor called the help desk, impersonated an employee found on LinkedIn, and gained access to internal systems. The
Welcome to the Phish Tour Nobody Asked For In March 2024, MGM Resorts was still tallying the damage from a social engineering attack that started with a single phone call. The threat actor convinced a help desk employee to reset credentials. Total estimated cost: over $100 million. That attack didn&
A Marketing Team's Slack Alternative Nearly Took Down an Entire Hospital Network In 2023, a regional healthcare system discovered that its marketing department had been using an unapproved messaging platform for over 14 months. Nobody in IT knew. The platform stored patient-adjacent data with no encryption, no access
