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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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Keylogger Attack

Keylogger Attack: How Hackers Steal Every Keystroke

In 2023, the FBI dismantled a cybercrime ring that used a commercial keylogger called Snake Keylogger to steal credentials from over 10,000 victims across 50 countries. The malware recorded every keystroke — banking passwords, email logins, private messages — and quietly exfiltrated the data to attacker-controlled servers. The victims had no

Carl B. Johnson Jul 14, 2019 6 min read
DNS Spoofing

DNS Spoofing Attack: How Hackers Redirect Your Traffic

Your Employees Think They're on Your Bank's Website. They're Not. In April 2022, researchers at Avast documented a campaign where threat actors compromised home routers to execute a DNS spoofing attack that redirected users trying to visit legitimate banking sites to near-perfect credential theft

Carl B. Johnson Jul 14, 2019 6 min read
Phishing Attacks

What Is a Phishing Attack? A Real-World Guide

In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 298,000 complaints about phishing — making it the most reported cybercrime for the fifth consecutive year. That number only accounts for what gets reported. The actual volume is staggering. So what is a phishing attack, and why does

Carl B. Johnson Apr 05, 2019 6 min read
What Is Cybersecurity

What Is Cybersecurity? A Practitioner's Real-World Guide

The Question Everyone Asks After the Breach In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor called Scattered Spider social-engineered its way past the help desk with a single phone call. The attackers didn't exploit some exotic zero-day vulnerability. They called IT, pretended to

Carl B. Johnson Feb 22, 2019 7 min read
Cybersecurity Definition

Cybersecurity Definition: What It Really Means in 2026

The Breach That Rewrote the Cybersecurity Definition for Everyone In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a social engineering attack that started with a single phone call to their help desk. The threat actor didn't exploit a zero-day vulnerability. They didn't brute-force a

Carl B. Johnson Feb 14, 2019 6 min read
Define Cyber

Define Cyber: What It Really Means in 2026

A Two-Billion-Dollar Word Nobody Can Explain In 2023, the SEC adopted new cybersecurity disclosure rules requiring every public company to report material cyber incidents within four business days. Boards scrambled. Legal teams panicked. And a surprising number of executives asked the same question behind closed doors: what does "cyber&

Carl B. Johnson Feb 02, 2019 6 min read
NIST Standards

NIST Standards: A Practical Guide for Real-World Security

When Change Healthcare suffered its catastrophic ransomware attack in early 2024 — disrupting pharmacy operations across the United States for weeks — investigators found a familiar culprit: stolen credentials and no multi-factor authentication on a critical system. The company's parent, UnitedHealth Group, eventually disclosed the breach affected roughly 100 million

Carl B. Johnson Feb 02, 2019 7 min read