Focuses on recognizing and countering manipulation tactics that attackers use to exploit human trust. Covers pretexting, baiting, tailgating, impersonation scams, and organizational defenses such as verification protocols, awareness campaigns, and incident reporting procedures.
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Why Threat Actors Love Targeting Law Firms In February 2021, the law firm Jones Day confirmed that hackers had stolen confidential client data through a vulnerability in Accellion's file-transfer appliance. Sensitive case documents, including those related to major corporate litigation, ended up on the Clop ransomware gang'
The Breach That Started with a Single Employee In May 2021, a single compromised password shut down Colonial Pipeline and triggered fuel shortages across the Eastern United States. The credential was tied to a legacy VPN account that lacked multi-factor authentication. One employee. One password. $4.4 million in ransom
A $4.24 Million Wake-Up Call IBM's 2021 Cost of a Data Breach Report found the average breach now costs $4.24 million — the highest in the report's 17-year history. But here's the number that keeps me up at night: 85% of breaches involved
A $150 Investment vs. a $4.24 Million Breach In March 2021, CNA Financial — one of the largest insurance companies in the U.S. — paid a reported $40 million ransom after a ransomware attack that started with a single employee interaction. That's not a typo. Forty million dollars
In April 2021, researchers discovered a database of 533 million Facebook user records — names, phone numbers, email addresses — freely circulating on a dark web forum. That same month, a compilation of 3.2 billion email-password pairs called "COMB" surfaced, aggregated from years of breaches. Stolen credentials on the
In January 2021, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise — a form of account takeover — cost victims over $1.8 billion in 2020 alone. That made it the costliest category of cybercrime by a wide margin. Not ransomware. Not credit card fraud. Account takeover.
Colonial Pipeline. SolarWinds. The Microsoft Exchange Server hack. We're barely halfway through 2021, and the breach headlines already read like a disaster film. Each one of these incidents started with something preventable — a compromised password, an unpatched system, a single employee who clicked the wrong link. The cybersecurity
Colonial Pipeline just paid $4.4 million in ransom to a criminal group called DarkSide — and they had a security vendor. SolarWinds, a company that literally sold security monitoring tools, became the vector for one of the most devastating supply chain attacks in history. If massive organizations with million-dollar security
In May 2021, a single compromised password shut down the largest fuel pipeline in the United States. The Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack disrupted gas supplies across the Eastern Seaboard, triggered panic buying, and cost the company a $4.4 million ransom payment. If you ever needed a reason to define
In March 2021, a single phishing email led to a credential theft incident at a mid-size manufacturing firm in Ohio. The attacker impersonated the CEO, asked the controller to update direct deposit information, and walked away with $1.7 million. The email had two typos, a slightly wrong domain, and
