Discover resources and strategies for building effective security awareness training programs. Posts cover curriculum design, engagement techniques, compliance requirements, and methods for measuring training impact to reduce human-related security incidents across organizations.
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The Receptionist Who Handed Over the Keys to the Kingdom In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor called the help desk, impersonated an employee found on LinkedIn, and convinced a staff member to reset credentials. No code was written. No zero-day exploit was deployed.
The Email That Cost One Company $121 Million In 2019, a Lithuanian national named Evaldas Rimasauskas pleaded guilty to stealing over $121 million from Google and Facebook using nothing more than fake invoices and spoofed email addresses. No zero-day exploits. No sophisticated malware. Just phishing emails that looked like they
Most Organizations Read CISA's Advice — Then Ignore the Hard Parts In 2023, the City of Dallas got hit with Royal ransomware. Services went down. Police dispatch systems broke. Recovery took weeks and cost millions. The attack vector? The kind of basic intrusion that CISA cybersecurity guidelines have warned
In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported over $12.5 billion in losses from internet crime — a record high driven largely by organized criminal groups running coordinated fraud operations. These aren't lone hackers in basements. They're structured teams with defined roles,
That Google Alert in Your Inbox Might Be Real — Or It Might Be the Attack Itself Last year, the FBI's IC3 received over 298,000 complaints related to phishing and personal data breaches — and a massive share of those started with a single email that looked exactly like
In 2023, a single phishing email cost MGM Resorts an estimated $100 million. The threat actor didn't exploit a zero-day vulnerability or deploy exotic malware. They called the help desk, impersonated an employee found on LinkedIn, and got a password reset. That's it. If you'
A $4.88 Million Problem That Starts With One Email In 2024, the average cost of a data breach hit $4.88 million globally, according to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report. The number one initial attack vector? Phishing. Not sophisticated zero-day exploits. Not nation-state hackers tunneling
In 2024, IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report pegged the global average cost of a single breach at $4.88 million — the highest figure ever recorded. And yet, when I talk to business owners after an incident, most of them ask the same question: How did this
A Single Lost Phone Cost This Company $4.9 Million In 2023, a healthcare organization reported a breach to HHS that started with one unencrypted smartphone left in an airport lounge. Patient records, internal credentials, VPN configurations — all exposed. The settlement and remediation costs were staggering. And here's
A Single Stolen Password Shut Down Half the East Coast's Fuel In May 2021, a single compromised VPN credential gave a threat actor access to Colonial Pipeline's network. The ransomware attack that followed forced the company to shut down 5,500 miles of pipeline, triggered fuel
