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.
posts
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
A school district in Arizona lost $3.5 million in January 2024 after a single employee followed a spoofed email's wire transfer instructions. No malware. No sophisticated zero-day exploit. Just one person who didn't recognize a social engineering attack. That's why most computer security
The Breach That Bankrupted a 40-Person Company In 2023, a small accounting firm in Sacramento lost every client record it had. An employee clicked a link in what looked like a DocuSign notification. Within 72 hours, the ransomware encrypted everything — backups included. The firm closed its doors three months later.
In November 2023, the international law firm Allen & Overy confirmed it was hit by a LockBit ransomware attack. Weeks earlier, a midsize firm in the southeastern U.S. paid a seven-figure ransom after a threat actor encrypted every client file on its network — and the firm never made headlines
In 2023, the FBI's IC3 received over 880,000 cybercrime complaints with losses exceeding $12.5 billion — and a massive chunk of those victims were everyday people sitting at home computers. Not Fortune 500 companies. Not government agencies. Regular people who thought their home setup was too small
In 2024, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 859,000 complaints with losses exceeding $16.6 billion — a 33% increase from the year before. That number isn't slowing down in 2026. I've spent years watching organizations and individuals make the same preventable
One Click Cost MGM Resorts $100 Million In September 2023, a threat actor called Scattered Spider called the MGM Resorts help desk, impersonated an employee found on LinkedIn, and convinced IT staff to reset credentials. The result: ten days of operational chaos, encrypted systems, and an estimated $100 million in
The Breach That Started With a Single Password In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor social-engineered a help desk employee with a ten-minute phone call. The attackers didn't exploit some exotic zero-day vulnerability. They used basic social engineering — information scraped from LinkedIn
