Posts under Threat Actor Defense focus on understanding adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures to build stronger security postures. Topics include threat intelligence, attacker profiling, defensive frameworks, and proactive measures organizations can deploy against nation-state and criminal threat actors.
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In 2023, MGM Resorts lost roughly $100 million after a social engineering phone call lasting just ten minutes gave a threat actor access to internal systems. The attackers didn't exploit some exotic zero-day vulnerability. They manipulated a help desk employee. If your cyber security definition starts and stops
A Six-Figure Salary With No Degree — and a $80K Debt With One I recently spoke with two cybersecurity analysts at the same company. One had an online computer security degree and $78,000 in student loans. The other had no degree, a handful of certifications, and a home lab built
The Hiring Manager Doesn't Care Where You Studied I've reviewed hundreds of resumes for security analyst and incident response roles over the years. Here's what surprises most people: an online computer security degree carries the same weight as one earned on a physical campus
In December 2024, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an advisory warning that Russian military-linked threat actors were systematically using brute force attacks to compromise Microsoft 365 accounts across government agencies and critical infrastructure. These weren't sophisticated zero-day exploits. They were automated password-guessing scripts
485,000 Unfilled Cybersecurity Jobs — And Counting CyberSeek's latest data shows roughly 714,548 cybersecurity job openings in the United States as of early 2022, with only about 1.1 million people employed in the field. That gap is enormous. If you're researching an online computer
A 22-Character Password Cracked in Under 4 Hours In 2023, a security researcher demonstrated that a 22-character password using only lowercase letters could be brute-forced in under four hours on consumer-grade GPU hardware. That wasn't a theoretical exercise — it was a wake-up call. Brute force attack prevention isn&
