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
Colonial Pipeline. SolarWinds. Microsoft Exchange. We're barely halfway through 2021 and the breach headlines are relentless. But here's what frustrates me most: the majority of these incidents didn't exploit exotic zero-day vulnerabilities. They exploited basic IT security gaps that organizations have known about for
Colonial Pipeline just paid $4.4 million in ransom to a criminal group called DarkSide — and they had a security vendor. SolarWinds, a company that literally sold security monitoring tools, became the vector for one of the most devastating supply chain attacks in history. If massive organizations with million-dollar security
Your Home Computer Is Now a High-Value Target In May 2021, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack shut down fuel delivery across the U.S. East Coast. The entry point? A single compromised password on a VPN account — likely tied to a home setup. If you're wondering how can
Colonial Pipeline just paid a $4.4 million ransom to get its systems back online, shutting down fuel delivery across the U.S. East Coast for nearly a week. If you searched for a cybersecurity definition expecting a clean, academic sentence, this incident should tell you everything textbooks leave out.
Capital One Lost 100 Million Records Because of One Misconfigured Firewall In 2019, a former cloud services employee exploited a misconfigured web application firewall to steal the personal data of over 100 million Capital One customers and applicants. The breach cost Capital One over $80 million in fines from the
In April 2021, a misconfigured cloud storage bucket at a major Android app developer exposed the personal data of over 100 million users. Names, emails, passwords, chat messages — all sitting in plain view because someone forgot to toggle a single setting. This wasn't an exotic zero-day exploit. It
In 2020, a 10-person accounting firm in Oregon lost $1.2 million after an employee clicked a single phishing link. The attacker impersonated the firm's bank, harvested credentials, and drained operating accounts over a weekend. No malware. No Hollywood hacking. Just one untrained employee and a well-crafted email.
The Receptionist Who Handed Over the Keys to the Kingdom In 2020, a Twitter employee received a phone call from someone claiming to be from the company's IT department. That single social engineering call — combined with a handful of others — led to the compromise of 130 high-profile accounts,
A Single Stolen Password Cost One Company $3.86 Million That's the average cost of a data breach in 2020, according to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report. And in nearly every major data breach example from recent years, the root cause wasn't
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
