Phishing awareness articles teach readers to identify and avoid phishing attacks across email, SMS, voice calls, and social media. Content includes real-world phishing examples, red flags to watch for, reporting procedures, and tips for running phishing simulation campaigns.
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The Breach That Started With a Single Reused Password In 2024, Change Healthcare suffered a ransomware attack that disrupted pharmacy operations across the entire United States. The root cause? Compromised credentials on a remote access system that lacked multi-factor authentication. One account. No MFA. Billions of dollars in damage. I&
A Single FakeEmail Cost This Company $37 Million In 2024, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise — attacks built on fakeemail messages that impersonate trusted senders — generated over $2.9 billion in adjusted losses. That made BEC the costliest cybercrime category for the fourth
A Phone Call That Sounds Exactly Like Google Support — But Isn't In late 2024, a Microsoft solutions consultant named Sam Mitrovic nearly lost his Google account to an AI-generated voice that sounded indistinguishable from a real Google support agent. The caller ID showed a legitimate Google number. The
A hiring manager at a Fortune 500 company recently told me something that would make most college admissions officers uncomfortable: "I've hired analysts with no degree who outperformed candidates with a master's." That's not an argument against education — it's a
A Google Developer Nearly Lost Everything to a Fake Support Call In early 2025, a well-known Google developer publicly documented how he nearly fell for a sophisticated phishing attack targeting his Gmail account. The caller ID showed a legitimate Google phone number. The voice on the other end sounded professional,
A $4.88 Million Problem With a Training-Shaped Solution IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report put the global average breach cost at $4.88 million. That number alone should end every budget debate about security awareness programs. But I still sit in meetings where executives ask
In January 2024, a massive dataset called "Naz.API" surfaced on dark web forums containing over 70 million unique email addresses and their associated passwords. Many of these credentials were still active. The breach wasn't the result of one sophisticated attack — it was an aggregation of
In 2019, a Lithuanian man named Evaldas Rimasauskas pleaded guilty to stealing over $100 million from Google and Facebook — using nothing more than a series of fake email messages. He impersonated a legitimate hardware vendor, sent invoices from spoofed email addresses, and two of the most sophisticated tech companies on
In September 2023, a threat actor called Scattered Spider social-engineered their way into MGM Resorts by calling the company's IT help desk. One phone call. That's all it took to trigger a shutdown that cost MGM an estimated $100 million. No zero-day exploit. No sophisticated malware.
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost roughly $100 million after a threat actor called Scattered Spider impersonated an employee on a help desk call — a textbook spear phishing technique that bypassed every technical control the company had. The attacker didn't blast out a million generic emails. They researched one
