A broad collection of posts covering foundational cybersecurity habits for individuals and organizations. Topics range from device hardening and software updates to access control policies, encryption standards, and incident response readiness.
posts
The 11-Billion-Record Wake-Up Call In January 2024, researchers discovered a file called "RockYou2024" containing nearly 10 billion unique plaintext passwords compiled from decades of data breaches. That's not a typo. Billions of passwords — many still in active use — sitting in a downloadable text file. If you&
The Virus That Cost a Hospital $65 Million In 2017, the WannaCry ransomware tore through the UK's National Health Service, locking down systems at over 80 organizations and forcing hospitals to divert ambulances. The estimated cost exceeded £92 million. The root cause? Unpatched Windows machines running a known
The Average Company Runs 130 SaaS Apps — And Secures Maybe Half In early 2024, a threat actor breached Snowflake customer environments — not by exploiting a zero-day, but by using stolen credentials harvested from infostealer malware. The result? Hundreds of millions of records exposed across companies like Ticketmaster and AT&
The Breach That Started With "Company123!" In 2024, the credential stuffing attack against Roku compromised over 576,000 accounts. The attackers didn't exploit some exotic zero-day vulnerability. They used passwords stolen from other breaches and tried them against Roku accounts — because people reuse passwords everywhere. That
In March 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that Americans lost over $10.3 billion to cybercrime in 2022 — a 49% increase from 2021. The majority of those losses didn't come from sophisticated nation-state attacks. They came from poor habits: reused passwords, unpatched software,
The Virus That Cost One Hospital Chain $67 Million In 2017, the NotPetya attack crippled organizations worldwide. Heritage Valley Health System in Pennsylvania lost access to its entire network. Surgeries were delayed. Patient records vanished. The total global damage from NotPetya exceeded $10 billion, according to the White House. And
The Breach That Started With "Company2019!" In January 2021, a security researcher discovered that a SolarWinds intern had used the password "solarwinds123" on a critical internal server. That detail, revealed during congressional hearings, became one of the most embarrassing footnotes in what was already one of
In January 2022, a credential stuffing attack hit Norton LifeLock, compromising roughly 925,000 accounts. The common thread? Weak and reused passwords. I've spent years watching organizations hemorrhage data because employees — and everyday users — still think "Company2022!" is a strong password. It's not. This
A $4.88 Million Problem With a Simple Fix IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report pegged the global average cost of a breach at $4.88 million. That number keeps climbing. But here's the part that should keep you up at night: the Verizon
The 24 Billion Stolen Passwords Sitting on the Dark Web Researchers at Digital Shadows found over 24 billion username-and-password combinations circulating on dark web marketplaces. That number keeps climbing. If you're still asking why use a password manager, the stolen credential economy already answered for you — your reused
