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.
posts
A single employee at MGM Resorts answered a phone call from someone pretending to be a coworker. That one social engineering attack in September 2023 led to roughly $100 million in losses, a crippled reservation system, and slot machines going dark across Las Vegas. The attacker didn't exploit
The AI-Generated Email That Fooled a Security Engineer In early 2025, a Google Workspace consultant named Sam Mitrovic publicly documented how he nearly fell for an AI-driven phishing attack targeting his Gmail account. The attacker spoofed Google's support number, used a perfectly natural AI-generated voice, and referenced real
Your Old AIM Email Is Still a Threat Vector In December 2017, AOL officially shut down AIM — AOL Instant Messenger — along with the ecosystem of AIM email accounts that millions of people had used for over two decades. Most users moved on. But here's the problem: their credentials
In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported over 43,000 victims of spoofing-related fraud, with losses exceeding $300 million. That number has only climbed since. And here's the part that should keep you up at night: a spoofing caller doesn't need malware,
A school district in Arizona lost $3.5 million in January 2024 after a single employee followed spoofed wire transfer instructions. The attacker didn't exploit a software vulnerability. They exploited trust. That incident captures why most computer security advice fails — it focuses on tools while ignoring the human
In January 2024, Microsoft disclosed that a Russian state-sponsored threat actor — Midnight Blizzard — breached corporate email accounts by exploiting a legacy test tenant that lacked multi-factor authentication. No zero-day exploit. No sophisticated malware. Just a password spray against a forgotten cloud account. That single oversight gave attackers months of access
The Breach That Changed How I Think About Cybersecurity In February 2024, Change Healthcare suffered a ransomware attack that disrupted pharmacy operations and medical claims processing across the entire United States. UnitedHealth Group later confirmed that roughly one-third of all Americans may have had their data exposed. The attack vector?
In January 2024, a massive credential stuffing attack compromised over 34,000 PayPal accounts — not because PayPal's systems failed, but because users reused passwords across multiple sites. The attackers didn't hack anything. They simply tried stolen credentials from other breaches and walked right in. If you&
In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 880,000 complaints with losses exceeding $12.5 billion — a 22% increase from the prior year. A significant portion of those complaints involved malware, ransomware, and credential theft that started with a single computer virus. If you think
In 2024, the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that stolen credentials were involved in roughly 31% of all breaches over the prior decade. That number hasn't budged much. I've worked incident response cases where a single reused password — a seven-character string an employee used on
