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Phishing Awareness

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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Phish

How to Phish Your Own Employees Before Hackers Do

A Single Phish Email Cost One Company $37 Million In 2024, Orion SA disclosed that a single employee fell for a business email compromise scheme and wired approximately $60 million to a threat actor's accounts. The company recovered some funds, but the net loss still exceeded $37 million.

Carl B. Johnson Jul 04, 2019 6 min read
Phish Tour

Phish Tour: How Attackers Rotate Tactics to Hook You

In early 2024, researchers at Proofpoint documented a campaign where a single threat actor group rotated through at least six distinct phishing lure templates in under three weeks — targeting financial services, healthcare, and education sectors in sequence. Security teams that recognized the first lure missed the second. Those who caught

Carl B. Johnson Jun 23, 2019 6 min read
Spear Phishing

Spear Phishing: Why Targeted Attacks Bypass Your Defenses

In 2023, MGM Resorts lost roughly $100 million after a threat actor called Scattered Spider used a spear phishing phone call — a single, targeted social engineering attack against an IT help desk employee — to breach one of the largest casino operators on the planet. The attacker found the employee'

Carl B. Johnson Jun 18, 2019 7 min read
AI Phishing Attacks

FBI Warns Gmail Users of AI-Driven Phishing Attacks

The FBI Warns Gmail Users of Sophisticated AI-Driven Phishing Attacks — And Most People Aren't Ready In late 2024, the FBI issued a stark public service announcement: threat actors are using generative AI to craft phishing emails so convincing that even seasoned IT professionals struggle to spot them. The

Carl B. Johnson Jun 12, 2019 7 min read
Fake Mail

Fake Mail: How to Spot It Before It Costs You

In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise — a sophisticated form of fake mail — caused adjusted losses exceeding $2.9 billion. That single category of email fraud outpaced every other cybercrime type in financial damage. And those are just the cases that got

Carl B. Johnson Jun 12, 2019 7 min read
Vishing

FBI Warning on Vishing and Smishing: What to Do Now

The FBI Warning on Vishing and Smishing You Can't Afford to Ignore In early 2024, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) flagged a sharp escalation in vishing and smishing campaigns targeting businesses and individuals across the United States. The 2023 IC3 Annual Report documented over

Carl B. Johnson Jun 12, 2019 7 min read
Phish Food

Phish Food: What Threat Actors Serve Your Employees

Your Inbox Is a Buffet — and Attackers Are Feeding In March 2024, MGM Resorts was still tallying the damage from a social engineering attack that started with a single phone call to their help desk. The cost? Over $100 million in losses. The attacker didn't exploit a zero-day

Carl B. Johnson Apr 05, 2019 7 min read
PayPal Phishing Attacks

PayPal Phishing Attacks: How to Spot and Stop Them

A Single PayPal Email Cost One Business Owner $68,000 I got the call on a Tuesday morning. A small business owner in Ohio had received what looked like a routine PayPal dispute notification. She clicked the link, entered her credentials, and within four hours, a threat actor had drained

Carl B. Johnson Apr 05, 2019 8 min read