Explores strategies and best practices for preventing data breaches in organizations of all sizes. Covers topics like access controls, encryption, network monitoring, incident response planning, and employee awareness to help reduce the risk of unauthorized data exposure.
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When Colonial Pipeline paid $4.4 million in ransom in May 2021, investigators traced the initial compromise back to a single compromised VPN credential — one that didn't have multi-factor authentication enabled. That's not a sophisticated nation-state exploit. That's a basic hygiene failure. And it
When Colonial Pipeline's CEO Joseph Blount testified before the Senate in June 2021, he admitted the company paid $4.4 million in ransom after a single compromised password shut down the largest fuel pipeline in the United States. No multi-factor authentication. No segmentation between IT and operational technology.
The SolarWinds Wake-Up Call for Every Boardroom When the SolarWinds breach came to light in December 2020, it didn't just compromise 18,000 organizations including multiple U.S. federal agencies. It put a spotlight on something security professionals have been shouting about for years: boards of directors are
When Marriott acquired Starwood Hotels in 2016, the deal looked solid on paper. Two years later, Marriott disclosed that hackers had been inside Starwood's reservation system since 2014 — exposing the personal data of up to 500 million guests. The breach predated the acquisition. The liability didn't.
In April 2021, a collection of 533 million Facebook user records surfaced on a dark web forum — names, phone numbers, email addresses, all posted for anyone to grab. Three months before that, a compilation of 3.2 billion email and password pairs called COMB (Compilation of Many Breaches) appeared on
In April 2021, researchers discovered a database of 533 million Facebook user records — names, phone numbers, email addresses — freely circulating on a dark web forum. That same month, a compilation of 3.2 billion email-password pairs called "COMB" surfaced, aggregated from years of breaches. Stolen credentials on the
23 Billion Stolen Credentials Are Circulating Right Now In 2020, Digital Shadows found more than 15 billion stolen credentials for sale on dark web markets — and that number has only climbed since. Every single one of those username-password pairs is ammunition for a credential stuffing attack. This isn't
In January 2021, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise — a form of account takeover — cost victims over $1.8 billion in 2020 alone. That made it the costliest category of cybercrime by a wide margin. Not ransomware. Not credit card fraud. Account takeover.
In March 2021, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise and identity theft schemes cost U.S. organizations over $4.2 billion in 2020 alone — making it the single most expensive category of cybercrime. That number isn't slowing down. If you run
During the 2020 SolarWinds breach investigation, I watched a boardroom full of executives stare blankly when an incident responder mentioned "lateral movement" and "supply chain compromise." They had no idea what was happening to their own network — not because they were negligent, but because nobody had
