Provides cybersecurity guidance tailored to small businesses that face resource constraints but remain high-value targets for attackers. Topics include affordable security tools, employee training, endpoint protection, and prioritizing defenses that deliver the greatest risk reduction on limited budgets.
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MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million from a single ransomware attack in September 2023. The entry point? A social engineering call to the help desk that lasted about ten minutes. That's all it took for the Scattered Spider threat actor group to cripple slot machines, hotel check-in
In January 2024, Microsoft disclosed that a Russian state-sponsored threat actor known as Midnight Blizzard had breached executive email accounts — not through some exotic zero-day exploit, but through a simple password spray attack on a legacy test account that lacked multi-factor authentication. If Microsoft can get caught flat-footed, your organization
In September 2023, MGM Resorts watched helplessly as a social engineering attack — reportedly initiated through a phone call to their help desk — cascaded into a full-blown operational shutdown. Slot machines went dark. Hotel room keys stopped working. The estimated cost exceeded $100 million. MGM had cybersecurity tools. What they lacked
A $1.5 Million Fine for "Reasonable Security" Failures In May 2023, the FTC hit online alcohol marketplace Drizly and its CEO with an enforcement order after a data breach exposed the personal information of roughly 2.5 million consumers. The kicker? The FTC had warned the company
The Breach That Started With a Single W-2 In early 2023, the IRS warned — again — about a surge in W-2 phishing scams targeting businesses. A threat actor sends one convincing email to someone in payroll. That person exports employee tax records. Within hours, fraudulent tax returns are filed under dozens
The Blind Spot That Computer Security Companies Sell Around In March 2022, Okta — one of the most prominent identity management vendors in the world — confirmed that the Lapsus$ threat actor group had compromised a third-party support engineer's laptop and accessed internal systems. An identity security company, breached through
The Colonial Pipeline Fallout Changed Everything About How We Buy Security One year ago, a single compromised password shut down the largest fuel pipeline in the United States. Colonial Pipeline paid $4.4 million in ransom. Gas stations across the Southeast ran dry. And the FBI later confirmed that the
The Breach That Started With a Single Stolen Password In May 2021, a single compromised password shut down fuel distribution across the Eastern United States. The Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack disrupted gas supplies for days and cost the company a $4.4 million ransom payment. The root cause? A legacy
When Colonial Pipeline got hit with ransomware in May 2021, they paid $4.4 million within hours. Their CEO later told a Senate committee the company had an incident response plan — but executing it under pressure exposed gaps nobody anticipated. If a company running critical U.S. infrastructure can stumble,
When Colonial Pipeline shut down 5,500 miles of fuel infrastructure in May 2021 due to a single compromised password, it wasn't a failure of technology. It was a failure of framework. The company lacked the layered defenses, detection capabilities, and response plans that the NIST Cybersecurity Framework
