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Security Awareness

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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Cybersecurity Best Practices

Cybersecurity Best Practices for Employees: A 2021 Guide

The Click That Cost One Company $46 Million In 2020, Ubiquiti Networks disclosed a breach that started with a single employee's compromised credentials. Attackers impersonated company executives, manipulated employees through social engineering, and walked away with $46.7 million in fraudulent wire transfers. The technology was fine. The

Carl B. Johnson Apr 02, 2021 8 min read
Data Breach Reporting

How to Report a Data Breach: A Step-by-Step Guide

The Clock Starts Ticking the Moment You Discover a Breach In December 2020, FireEye disclosed it had been breached by a sophisticated threat actor — a revelation that quickly unraveled into the massive SolarWinds supply chain compromise affecting 18,000 organizations including multiple U.S. government agencies. The question every security

Carl B. Johnson Jan 14, 2021 7 min read
Cost of a Data Breach

Cost of a Data Breach: What 2021 Trends Tell Us

The Cost of a Data Breach Is Already Staggering — And the Trajectory Is Alarming In 2020, the average cost of a data breach hit $3.86 million globally, according to IBM and the Ponemon Institute's annual Cost of a Data Breach Report. That number has been climbing steadily

Carl B. Johnson Jan 14, 2021 6 min read
Password Security

Password Security Best Practices That Actually Work

The Breach That Started With a Single Reused Password In December 2020, the SolarWinds breach dominated every security headline on the planet. But while the world fixated on nation-state threat actors and supply chain attacks, I kept thinking about a detail that emerged early: a SolarWinds intern had reportedly set

Carl B. Johnson Jan 14, 2021 7 min read
Multi-Factor Authentication

MFA vs Two-Factor Authentication: What Actually Matters

In July 2020, a teenager orchestrated one of the most high-profile breaches in social media history — the Twitter hack that compromised accounts belonging to Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and Apple. The attack vector? Social engineering and credential theft that bypassed weak authentication controls. It was a brutal reminder that passwords

Carl B. Johnson Jan 11, 2021 6 min read
Password Hygiene Tips

Password Hygiene Tips That Actually Stop Breaches

In December 2020, SolarWinds disclosed a supply chain compromise that shook the entire cybersecurity industry. But while the world was focused on nation-state threat actors, Verizon's 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report had already confirmed something far more common and just as devastating: over 80% of hacking-related breaches involved

Carl B. Johnson Jan 03, 2021 7 min read
Cybersecurity Incident Response

Cybersecurity Incident Response: A Battle-Tested Guide

In July 2020, Twitter lost control of 130 high-profile accounts — including those of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and Apple — in a social engineering attack that bypassed every technical control the company had. The attackers didn't use a zero-day exploit. They manipulated employees. And Twitter's cybersecurity incident

Carl B. Johnson Dec 20, 2020 7 min read
Incident Response Plan Template

Incident Response Plan Template: Build Yours Today

The SolarWinds breach discovered this month compromised at least 18,000 organizations — including multiple U.S. government agencies — and most of them had no actionable incident response plan template ready when the alerts started firing. I've watched organizations scramble through breaches with nothing but a stale PDF from

Carl B. Johnson Dec 20, 2020 7 min read