Tag

Phishing

Explore in-depth articles about phishing attacks, including email phishing, spear phishing, smishing, and vishing. Learn how attackers craft deceptive messages, steal credentials, and compromise systems — and discover proven strategies to detect and block these threats.

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Adware vs Spyware

Adware vs Spyware: Key Differences You Must Know

That "Harmless" Toolbar Was Anything But A few years back, I helped a small accounting firm figure out why their machines had slowed to a crawl every March — right when they needed them most. The culprit? A browser toolbar that one employee had installed, thinking it was a

Carl B. Johnson Sep 10, 2026 5 min read
Malware

What Is Malware? A Security Pro's Field Guide for 2026

A Single Employee Click Cost One Hospital $10 Million In 2024, Change Healthcare suffered one of the most devastating ransomware attacks in U.S. history. The breach disrupted pharmacy systems, delayed patient care nationwide, and cost UnitedHealth Group over $870 million in the first quarter alone. The root cause? Compromised

Carl B. Johnson Sep 09, 2026 5 min read
Fake Identity Website

Fake Identity Website Scams: How to Spot and Stop Them

A Single Fake Identity Website Cost One Company $23 Million In early 2024, a finance employee at Arup, a British engineering firm, was tricked into transferring approximately $25 million after threat actors used a deepfake video call combined with a fake identity website that impersonated senior executives. The site looked

Carl B. Johnson Sep 07, 2026 5 min read
DNS Spoofing Attack

DNS Spoofing Attack: How Hackers Hijack Your Traffic

In April 2022, researchers at Tsinghua University and the University of California disclosed a new class of DNS cache poisoning vulnerabilities affecting major DNS software. The attack, dubbed "MaginotDNS," could redirect users from legitimate banking and email sites to pixel-perfect phishing pages — and the victims never saw a

Carl B. Johnson Sep 07, 2026 6 min read
Spoofing

Spoofing Attacks: How Hackers Impersonate You

In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise — a category heavily fueled by spoofing — accounted for over $2.9 billion in adjusted losses. That made it the single most financially devastating cybercrime category they tracked. Not ransomware. Not crypto scams. Spoofing-driven impersonation. If

Carl B. Johnson Sep 03, 2026 6 min read
Phishing

How to Spot Phishing Emails Before They Cost You

In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 298,000 phishing complaints — making it the most reported cybercrime category for the fifth consecutive year. And those are just the ones people actually reported. I've spent years helping organizations recover from phishing attacks, and I

Carl B. Johnson Sep 02, 2026 5 min read
Phishing

Define Phishing: What It Really Means in 2026

In 2024, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 298,000 phishing complaints — making it the most reported cybercrime category for the fifth consecutive year. Despite billions spent on security tools, phishing remains the number one way threat actors break into organizations. So let's actually

Carl B. Johnson Aug 29, 2026 5 min read
DNS Spoofing Attack

DNS Spoofing Attack: How Hackers Redirect Your Traffic

Your Employees Typed the Right URL — And Still Got Hacked In April 2022, researchers at Avast documented a campaign where a threat actor compromised home routers and used DNS hijacking to redirect users from legitimate banking sites to pixel-perfect phishing clones. Victims typed the correct URL into their browser. Their

Carl B. Johnson Aug 25, 2026 6 min read
Phishing

Phishing: Why It Still Works and How to Stop It

A Single Email Cost This Company Everything In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor used a phone-based social engineering attack — a technique closely related to phishing — to gain access to their systems. The attackers didn't exploit a zero-day vulnerability or brute-force a

Carl B. Johnson Aug 22, 2026 5 min read