Explore strategies for building and sustaining a strong security culture within organizations. These articles cover leadership engagement, employee behavior change, security awareness program design, and practical methods for making cybersecurity a shared responsibility across every department.
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The Breach That Started With a Single Click In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor called Scattered Spider social-engineered an IT help desk employee with a phone call that lasted about ten minutes. The attacker didn't exploit a zero-day vulnerability. They didn&
In March 2021, a mid-size law firm in Atlanta lost $2.3 million to a single wire fraud attack. The attacker spoofed the managing partner's email, requested an urgent transfer, and a paralegal complied without hesitation. When the firm investigated, they discovered their annual security awareness program consisted
In March 2020, a single employee at Magellan Health clicked a phishing email that impersonated an executive. The result: a ransomware attack that exposed personal data of over 365,000 individuals. The attacker didn't exploit a zero-day vulnerability. They didn't brute-force a firewall. They sent an
Your Training Program Is Worthless Without Proof In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a social engineering attack that started with a single phone call to the help desk. The company almost certainly had a security awareness program in place. So did Caesars Entertainment, which paid a
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor social-engineered the company's IT help desk with a ten-minute phone call. The attacker didn't exploit a zero-day. They didn't brute-force a password. They simply convinced a human being to hand over
Your Training Program Might Be Failing — and You'd Never Know In 2024, IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report pegged the global average breach cost at $4.88 million. Organizations with security awareness training and incident response planning cut that number dramatically. But here's
A 45-Minute Training Video Nobody Watched In 2023, a mid-size healthcare company I consulted for spent $60,000 on a compliance-focused security awareness program. It featured a 45-minute narrated slideshow, a 10-question quiz, and a certificate of completion. Their post-training phishing simulation results? A 31% click rate — virtually unchanged from
Most Quiz Questions Are a Waste of Everyone's Time I recently reviewed a Fortune 500 company's annual security awareness program. Their quiz had 20 multiple-choice questions. One of them asked employees to define the word "malware." Another asked which year the first computer virus
