Tag

Phishing Prevention

Delivers actionable advice on recognizing and preventing phishing attacks, including email phishing, spear phishing, smishing, and vishing. Covers detection techniques, employee training approaches, email security tools, and real-world phishing examples to strengthen your defenses.

posts

Shadow IT

What Is Shadow IT? The Hidden Risk Draining Your Budget

The Breach That Started With a Spreadsheet App In 2023, a midsize healthcare company discovered that an employee had been syncing patient records to an unauthorized cloud storage service for over eight months. The service had no encryption, no access controls, and no audit logging. By the time the security

Carl B. Johnson Oct 27, 2020 7 min read
SaaS Security Best Practices

SaaS Security Best Practices to Protect Your Stack

The SaaS Sprawl Nobody's Watching In 2023, a single misconfigured Salesforce Community site exposed sensitive health records from a government agency in Vermont. The data was public for months before anyone noticed. The application wasn't hacked in any traditional sense — it was simply left open because

Carl B. Johnson Oct 27, 2020 8 min read
Mobile Device Security Policy

Mobile Device Security Policy: What Yours Is Missing

A Single Lost Phone Cost This Company $3.3 Million In 2023, the healthcare provider Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital disclosed a data breach where a security guard used login credentials on a personal mobile device to access the records of over 400 patients. That incident triggered an OCR investigation, reputational

Carl B. Johnson Oct 27, 2020 7 min read
Shoulder Surfing Attack

Shoulder Surfing Attack: The Low-Tech Threat You Ignore

A former employee at a financial services firm in Chicago watched his coworker type her password every morning for two weeks. He memorized it character by character. After he was terminated for performance issues, he used those stolen credentials to access the company's client database from a public

Carl B. Johnson Oct 10, 2020 7 min read
Cybersecurity Culture

Cybersecurity Culture in the Workplace: A Practical Guide

The Breach That Started With a Single Slack Message In September 2022, a threat actor sent a series of social engineering messages to an Uber employee, eventually convincing them to approve a multi-factor authentication push notification. That single lapse gave the attacker access to internal systems, Slack channels, and admin

Carl B. Johnson Oct 10, 2020 7 min read
Cybersecurity Culture

Building a Cybersecurity Culture That Actually Works

A Fortune 500 Company Got Breached by a Phone Call In September 2023, a threat actor called MGM Resorts' IT help desk, impersonated an employee found on LinkedIn, and convinced a technician to reset credentials. The result? Over $100 million in losses, days of operational chaos, and a stock

Carl B. Johnson Oct 10, 2020 7 min read
Cyber Hygiene Checklist

Cyber Hygiene Checklist: 12 Steps That Actually Work

In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor called Scattered Spider social-engineered an IT help desk with a ten-minute phone call. No zero-day exploit. No nation-state tooling. Just sloppy basics. That breach — and hundreds like it every year — could have been prevented with a disciplined

Carl B. Johnson Sep 07, 2020 7 min read
CEO Fraud

CEO Fraud Email Scam: How Attackers Steal Millions

A Single Email Cost This Company $47 Million In 2015, Ubiquiti Networks disclosed that attackers impersonating company executives tricked finance employees into wiring $46.7 million to overseas accounts controlled by threat actors. No malware. No zero-day exploit. Just a carefully crafted CEO fraud email scam that exploited trust, urgency,

Carl B. Johnson Sep 07, 2020 7 min read
Man in the Middle Attack

Man in the Middle Attack: How Hackers Steal Data

In 2015, a Belgian company called Crelan Bank lost over €70 million to a sophisticated fraud scheme that began with attackers intercepting email communications between executives. The threat actors positioned themselves between two parties, manipulated invoices, and redirected payments — all without either side realizing the conversation had been compromised. That&

Carl B. Johnson May 08, 2020 7 min read