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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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Mobile Device Security Policy

Mobile Device Security Policy: What Yours Is Missing

A Single Stolen Phone Cost This Company $4.9 Million In 2023, a healthcare organization reported to the HHS that a single unencrypted mobile device — left in a rideshare — led to the exposure of over 100,000 patient records. The resulting HIPAA settlement, remediation costs, and reputational damage ran into

Carl B. Johnson Apr 22, 2025 7 min read
Cyber Hygiene

Cyber Hygiene Definition: What It Really Means in 2025

In February 2024, Change Healthcare — one of the largest health payment processors in the U.S. — got hit with a ransomware attack that disrupted claims processing for weeks and exposed data on roughly 100 million individuals. The root cause? Compromised credentials on a system that lacked multi-factor authentication. That'

Carl B. Johnson Mar 25, 2025 7 min read
Cyber Hygiene Checklist

Cyber Hygiene Checklist: 12 Steps That Actually Work

The Breach That Started With a Reused Password In January 2024, Microsoft disclosed that a Russian threat actor group known as Midnight Blizzard compromised executive email accounts — not through some exotic zero-day, but by password spraying a legacy test account that lacked multi-factor authentication. One overlooked account. No MFA. That&

Carl B. Johnson Mar 17, 2025 7 min read
Cybersecurity for Executives

Cybersecurity for Executives: What Boards Must Know

The CEO Who Clicked Reply In 2023, the SEC charged SolarWinds' CISO Timothy Brown for misleading investors about the company's cybersecurity practices. That action sent a shockwave through every C-suite in America. Suddenly, cybersecurity wasn't just an IT issue — it was a personal liability issue.

Carl B. Johnson Mar 17, 2025 7 min read
Vendor Risk Management

Vendor Risk Management Cybersecurity: A Practical Guide

The Breach That Didn't Start With You In February 2024, Change Healthcare — a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group — suffered a ransomware attack that disrupted healthcare payment processing across the entire United States for weeks. The threat actor didn't breach UnitedHealth directly. They compromised a vendor system that

Carl B. Johnson Feb 28, 2025 8 min read
Dark Web Monitoring

Dark Web Monitoring for Businesses: A Practical Guide

In February 2024, a threat actor going by "USDoD" listed 2.9 billion records from National Public Data on a dark web forum — records that included Social Security numbers, full names, and addresses of nearly every American adult. The breach didn't make mainstream headlines until months

Carl B. Johnson Feb 28, 2025 8 min read
Cybersecurity Glossary

Cybersecurity Glossary for Beginners: 40 Terms You Need

When the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack shut down fuel distribution across the U.S. East Coast in May 2021, millions of people suddenly needed to understand words like "ransomware," "threat actor," and "critical infrastructure." But most glossaries online read like they were written by

Carl B. Johnson Jan 06, 2025 8 min read
SQL Injection

SQL Injection Explained: The Attack That Won't Die

A 20-Year-Old Vulnerability Still Dominating Breach Reports In 2023, the MOVEit Transfer vulnerability (CVE-2023-34362) compromised over 2,600 organizations and exposed data on more than 77 million individuals. At its core, the exploit was a SQL injection. The Cl0p ransomware gang used it to steal data from federal agencies, major

Carl B. Johnson Dec 19, 2024 7 min read