Understand how ransomware attacks work and what steps you can take to prevent, detect, and recover from them. Our ransomware protection articles cover backup strategies, network segmentation, incident response planning, and the latest defenses against evolving ransomware variants.
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The Breach That Started With a Single Reused Password In 2024, Change Healthcare suffered a ransomware attack that disrupted pharmacy operations across the entire United States. The root cause? Compromised credentials on a remote access system that lacked multi-factor authentication. One account. No MFA. Billions of dollars in damage. I&
A single employee at MGM Resorts answered a phone call from someone pretending to be a coworker. That one social engineering attack in September 2023 led to roughly $100 million in losses, a crippled reservation system, and slot machines going dark across Las Vegas. The attacker didn't exploit
A school district in Arizona lost $3.5 million in January 2024 after a single employee followed spoofed wire transfer instructions. The attacker didn't exploit a software vulnerability. They exploited trust. That incident captures why most computer security advice fails — it focuses on tools while ignoring the human
The Breach That Changed How I Think About Cybersecurity In February 2024, Change Healthcare suffered a ransomware attack that disrupted pharmacy operations and medical claims processing across the entire United States. UnitedHealth Group later confirmed that roughly one-third of all Americans may have had their data exposed. The attack vector?
In November 2023, the international law firm Allen & Overy confirmed it was hit by a LockBit ransomware attack that disrupted internal systems and exposed sensitive data. They weren't alone. The American Bar Association disclosed a data breach that same year affecting 1.4 million members. If you
The Breach That Cost a 12-Person Company Everything In 2023, a small accounting firm in Sacramento lost access to every client file it had. A single employee clicked a link in a fake DocuSign email. Within four hours, ransomware had encrypted the entire network. The ransom demand was $250,000.
Your Home Computer Is a Bigger Target Than You Think In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 880,000 complaints with losses exceeding $12.5 billion — and a massive share of those victims were everyday people targeted through their personal machines. Not corporate networks. Not
In 2024, the average cost of a data breach hit $4.88 million according to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report. That number keeps climbing. And after two decades in this field, I can tell you that most of those breaches didn't involve some sophisticated
A Single Checkbox Left 540 Million Facebook Records Exposed Back in 2019, researchers at UpGuard discovered that two third-party Facebook app developers had stored more than 540 million user records on Amazon S3 buckets with no access restrictions. Not encrypted. Not firewalled. Just sitting there, publicly readable, because someone didn&
In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 880,000 complaints with potential losses exceeding $12.5 billion — and small businesses absorbed a disproportionate share of that damage. I've worked with companies of 15 employees that lost six figures to a single business email
