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 Text Message That Cost a Company $15 Million In 2022, Twilio disclosed a breach that started with a simple SMS message. Employees received text messages impersonating the IT department, directing them to a fake login page. Several entered their credentials. That single vector — mobile phishing attacks delivered via text
The CEO Who Clicked the Link In 2024, the SEC charged SolarWinds' CISO with fraud and internal control failures tied to the massive breach that compromised federal agencies and Fortune 500 companies. That case sent shockwaves through every boardroom in America — not because of the technical details, but because
The SEC Changed Everything — Most Boards Still Haven't Caught Up In July 2023, the SEC adopted rules requiring public companies to disclose material cybersecurity incidents within four business days and to describe their board's oversight of cyber risk annually. Since then, I've reviewed dozens
The CEO Who Wired $47 Million to a Threat Actor In 2016, Austrian aerospace manufacturer FACC lost €42 million (roughly $47 million) after attackers impersonated the company's CEO via email and convinced an employee in the finance department to transfer funds for a fake acquisition project. The CEO
In January 2024, a massive dataset known as the "Mother of All Breaches" surfaced containing 26 billion records — credentials scraped, aggregated, and repackaged from hundreds of previous data breaches. Usernames. Passwords. Email addresses. All of it sitting on dark web forums, available to anyone willing to pay. If
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor called Scattered Spider social-engineered the company's IT help desk with a ten-minute phone call. The attacker didn't exploit a zero-day vulnerability. They didn't brute-force a password. They just talked their way
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.
That Gmail Notification Might Be Real — Or It Might Be the Attack Itself In January 2024, Google reported blocking over 99.9% of phishing emails from reaching Gmail inboxes. That sounds impressive until you realize that the remaining fraction still amounts to millions of malicious messages daily. Among the most
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
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'
