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 Bankrupted a 40-Person Company In 2023, a small accounting firm in Sacramento lost every client record it had. A single employee clicked a phishing link disguised as a DocuSign notification. Within 72 hours, a threat actor had deployed ransomware across the entire network. The firm paid $350,
The Accountant Who Cost Her Company $2.3 Million She wasn't careless. She wasn't stupid. She was a 15-year veteran of her firm's finance department, and she followed what she thought was a legitimate email from the CEO asking for an urgent wire transfer.
A Single Click Cost One Hospital Chain $100 Million In 2024, Change Healthcare — the payment processing backbone for thousands of U.S. healthcare providers — was crippled by a ransomware attack attributed to the ALPHV/BlackCat group. UnitedHealth Group, Change Healthcare's parent company, disclosed that the incident cost over
The Breach That Cost Change Healthcare Everything In February 2024, a threat actor used stolen credentials to access Change Healthcare's systems — systems that lacked multi-factor authentication on a critical remote access portal. The result? A ransomware attack that disrupted pharmacy operations across the United States for weeks and
A Single Misconfigured Bucket Cost Them Everything In 2023, Toyota disclosed that a cloud misconfiguration had exposed the vehicle location data of 2.15 million customers for over a decade. The root cause wasn't a sophisticated threat actor. It was a single storage bucket set to public instead
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a social engineering attack that started with a single phone call to a help desk. The attackers didn't exploit a zero-day vulnerability. They didn't write exotic malware. They called IT support, impersonated an employee, and got
The Breach That Changed How I Think About Cybersecurity In February 2024, Change Healthcare suffered a ransomware attack that disrupted insurance claims processing for hospitals and pharmacies across the United States. UnitedHealth Group confirmed the breach affected approximately 100 million individuals — making it one of the largest healthcare data breaches
In February 2024, Change Healthcare — one of the largest health payment processors in the United States — suffered a ransomware attack that disrupted pharmacy operations, delayed insurance claims, and exposed the protected health information of roughly 100 million people. One set of stolen credentials. No multi-factor authentication on a critical system.
In 2024, the average cost of a data breach hit $4.88 million globally, according to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report. That number didn't come from sophisticated nation-state attacks or exotic zero-days. Most of those breaches started with stolen credentials, a phishing email, or
The Breach That $300K in Security Tools Didn't Stop In 2023, a mid-sized healthcare firm in the Midwest spent over $300,000 annually on products from multiple computer security companies. Endpoint detection, SIEM, email gateway filtering — the full stack. Then an employee clicked a phishing link inside a
