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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In March 2022, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that phishing schemes were the most common cybercrime in 2021, with over 323,000 victims — more than double the count from 2019. That number is climbing again in 2022. If you're searching for how to spot
The FakeEmail Problem Is Bigger Than You Think In March 2022, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise — the category that covers most fakeemail schemes — accounted for $2.4 billion in adjusted losses in 2021 alone. That made it the single most financially damaging
In March 2022, a single employee at Okta clicked a link in what appeared to be a routine IT notification. That one click gave the Lapsus$ threat actor group access to internal systems, ultimately affecting roughly 2.5% of Okta's customer base — hundreds of organizations. The attack didn&
A Single Phishing Email Led to a $100 Million Heist Between 2013 and 2015, a Lithuanian man orchestrated one of the most audacious cases of group online svindel ever documented. Evaldas Rimasauskas and his associates impersonated a legitimate Asian hardware manufacturer and tricked both Google and Facebook into wiring over
A Perfectly Forged Invoice That Almost Worked Last month, a controller at a mid-sized logistics company forwarded me an email she'd almost clicked. It looked like a DocuSign envelope notification for a PayPal invoice — complete with the yellow DocuSign button, a legitimate-looking PayPal logo, and a $3,200
Every week, I get emails from readers asking the same type of question: "I found this app called Removed — is it legit?" Sometimes it's Removed, sometimes it's another obscure app that popped up in a search result, an ad, or a text message from
In March 2022, the FBI warned that business email compromise — a category dominated by spear phishing — cost victims over $2.4 billion in 2021 alone, making it the most financially damaging cybercrime category in the FBI IC3 Annual Report. That number dwarfs ransomware losses. So what is spear phishing, exactly,
The Breach That Should Have Changed Everything In March 2022, the Lapsus$ group breached Okta, Microsoft, Samsung, and Nvidia in rapid succession — not by deploying sophisticated zero-day exploits, but by buying stolen credentials, social engineering help desk employees, and exploiting MFA fatigue. A group reportedly led by teenagers embarrassed some
In March 2022, the Lapsus$ group breached Okta by compromising a third-party support engineer's laptop — and suddenly, thousands of organizations realized their web security posture was only as strong as their weakest vendor's. That single incident forced a reckoning across the industry. If your organization runs
In March 2022, the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report team released preliminary findings showing that 82% of breaches involved the human element — phishing, stolen credentials, and social engineering. Meanwhile, most organizations I work with still treat NIST standards like a dusty compliance checkbox rather than what they actually are: a
