Develop a strong security mindset with articles focused on security awareness principles, social engineering defense, safe browsing habits, password hygiene, and recognizing manipulation tactics used by attackers targeting human vulnerabilities.
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In July 2021, a ransomware attack on Kaseya's VSA software cascaded through managed service providers and hit up to 1,500 businesses — many of them small companies with remote workers connecting through poorly secured endpoints. The REvil gang demanded $70 million. That single incident crystallized what I'
The Policy Nobody Reads Until It's Too Late In December 2020, a SolarWinds employee reportedly used the password "solarwinds123" on a critical server — a credential so weak it became a punchline at Congressional hearings. But here's the question nobody asked loudly enough: did SolarWinds
The Sector Threat Actors Love to Target In August 2021, the Howard University data breach forced the school to cancel classes for an entire week. A ransomware attack encrypted critical systems, disrupted enrollment, and left students scrambling for answers. Howard isn't an outlier. It's a case
Your Employees Are Building a Second Network — And You Can't See It In March 2021, a vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server sent security teams scrambling. But here's what didn't make the headlines: many organizations discovered Exchange instances they didn't even know existed.
In March 2021, a single compromised password led to the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack that shut down fuel delivery across the U.S. East Coast. The account didn't even have multi-factor authentication enabled. That's not a sophisticated nation-state exploit — that's a basic cyber hygiene
When Colonial Pipeline paid $4.4 million in ransom in May 2021, investigators traced the initial compromise back to a single compromised VPN credential — one that didn't have multi-factor authentication enabled. That's not a sophisticated nation-state exploit. That's a basic hygiene failure. And it
When Colonial Pipeline's CEO Joseph Blount testified before the Senate in June 2021, he admitted the company paid $4.4 million in ransom after a single compromised password shut down the largest fuel pipeline in the United States. No multi-factor authentication. No segmentation between IT and operational technology.
In April 2021, a collection of 533 million Facebook user records surfaced on a dark web forum — names, phone numbers, email addresses, all posted for anyone to grab. Three months before that, a compilation of 3.2 billion email and password pairs called COMB (Compilation of Many Breaches) appeared on
In March 2020, Microsoft engineers published a finding that stunned even seasoned security professionals: accounts protected by multi-factor authentication block over 99.9% of automated attacks. Yet as of mid-2021, adoption remains shockingly low. The FBI's 2020 IC3 report documented $4.2 billion in cybercrime losses, with compromised
In February 2021, T-Mobile disclosed a data breach that exposed customer phone numbers and SIM information. That same month, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center continued logging a surge in SIM swap complaints — a threat that directly undermines SMS-based two-factor authentication. If your organization still relies on text
