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.
posts
The Breach That Cost a Charity Its Reputation — and Its Donors In 2023, the nonprofit organization Save the Children Federation confirmed it was hit by the BianLian ransomware group, which claimed to have stolen nearly 7 GB of data including financial records, personal information, and medical data. A global charity
The Misconfigured Bucket That Exposed 540 Million Records In 2019, researchers at UpGuard discovered that Facebook user data — over 540 million records — sat exposed on misconfigured Amazon S3 buckets maintained by third-party app developers. Nobody hacked anything. Nobody exploited a zero-day. The data was simply left open to the public
The Text Message That Cost One Company $40 Million In 2024, a sophisticated smishing campaign targeted employees at several major financial institutions. Threat actors sent SMS messages impersonating IT support, directing staff to fake login portals that harvested credentials and multi-factor authentication tokens. The attackers then used those stolen credentials
In March 2024, a finance director at a mid-size logistics company received a text message that appeared to come from the CEO. It asked for a quick wire transfer to close a vendor deal. The director tapped the link, entered credentials on what looked like the company's banking
In January 2024, a penetration tester hired by the Iowa State Court Administration was arrested for breaking into a courthouse — even though he had a signed contract to test physical security. The incident made national news and sparked a legal battle. But it also exposed something most organizations ignore: the
The SEC Made It Official — Your Board Can't Plead Ignorance Anymore In July 2023, the SEC finalized rules requiring publicly traded companies to disclose material cybersecurity incidents within four business days and to describe their board's oversight of cyber risk annually. That wasn't a
Your Employees' Passwords Are Probably Already for Sale In January 2024, researchers discovered a file called "Naz.API" circulating on dark web forums containing over 71 million unique email addresses paired with plaintext passwords — many harvested by credential-stealing malware. That's not a hypothetical. That'
In September 2023, MGM Resorts watched helplessly as its systems went dark — slot machines frozen, hotel check-ins offline, operations paralyzed for ten days. The estimated cost exceeded $100 million. The attack vector? Social engineering that led to credential theft, which opened the door for malware deployment across the enterprise. That&
In January 2024, security researchers at Sekoia documented a massive adversary-in-the-middle campaign that used phishing kits to intercept Microsoft 365 credentials and session tokens in real time — bypassing multi-factor authentication entirely. The attack wasn't theoretical. It hit thousands of organizations across multiple industries. And it reminded every security
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a single social engineering phone call tricked an IT help desk employee into resetting credentials. One employee. One question they got wrong in real life — not on a cybersecurity awareness quiz, but in a live attack. The attacker found a
