Explore how ransomware attacks work, how they infiltrate networks, and what steps individuals and organizations can take to prevent, detect, and recover from ransomware incidents. Articles cover recent ransomware variants, encryption tactics, backup strategies, and incident response planning.
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A Single Breach Now Costs More Than Most Companies Budget for Security All Year IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report pegged the global average at $4.88 million — a 10% jump from the prior year and the highest figure ever recorded. If you think the cost
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a social engineering attack that started with a single phone call to an IT help desk. The threat actor impersonated an employee, convinced a technician to reset credentials, and within hours had deployed ransomware across critical systems. Slot machines went
A Single Stolen Password Started a $4.4 Billion Problem In May 2021, a single compromised password shut down the Colonial Pipeline — the largest fuel pipeline in the United States. Fuel shortages hit the East Coast. Panic buying emptied gas stations across multiple states. The company paid a $4.4
The Breach That Nobody Reported — Until It Was Too Late In 2023, a mid-size healthcare provider in the Midwest discovered suspicious network activity on a Friday afternoon. The IT manager flagged it internally but didn't report it externally. By Monday morning, threat actors had exfiltrated 1.4 million
Why Threat Actors Treat Law Firms Like ATMs In 2023, the international law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner disclosed a breach that exposed the personal data of over 51,000 individuals — including clients of major corporations like Mondelēz. That same year, an Am Law 100 firm paid a multimillion-dollar ransom
In December 2020, security firm FireEye disclosed that threat actors had compromised SolarWinds' Orion software platform — and with it, roughly 18,000 organizations that installed a poisoned update. Government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and critical infrastructure operators all got hit through a single trusted vendor. That's the
During a breach investigation last year, I watched a CFO stare blankly at an incident responder who kept saying "the threat actor used credential stuffing to pivot laterally after compromising an MFA-gapped endpoint." The CFO's response: "Can someone please speak English?" That moment cost
In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received over 880,000 complaints with potential losses exceeding $12.5 billion — a 22% increase from the year before. A massive share of those incidents started with a single piece of malicious software landing on someone's machine.
In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 880,000 complaints with potential losses exceeding $12.5 billion — and malware was the engine behind a staggering number of those incidents. I've worked incident response cases where a single malware infection spiraled into a multi-million-dollar
