The People Getting Attacked Are the Ones Nobody Writes For
There is a great deal of security writing and almost none of it is addressed to the people losing money.
Tag: Cybersecurity (Page 4)
CybersecurityThe Ransomware Years: When Laptops Became Bricks
Somebody opened a link, and their machine was a brick. Literally unrecoverable. Across a fleet of 1,500 desktops and laptops we lost machines to ransomware over and over, and never lost the network, because the network was designed by people…
CybersecurityMy Own Site Got Hit: Anatomy of a WordPress Supply-Chain Attack
The email said malware had been quarantined on my site and I had three days to fix it. Deleting the file took a minute. The forensics took two days, and the trail ended somewhere worse than a break-in: the plugin…
Business ContinuityThe Day Every Safety Net Failed: Anatomy of a Cascading Disaster
My consultant called while I was driving to a Renaissance fair: the power had failed, the generator had not come on, one UPS was missing, a coin-sized battery had died, the DR link had been down for two days, and…
ComplianceDocumenting Roles, Not Just Rules: A NIST Project That Got Personal
Four to five months of interviews, C-suite down, mapping every policy to a named role. The project revealed something no framework document warns you about: the CFO did not know what segregation of duties was, and once he understood it,…
CybersecurityDefense in Layers: Why One Scanner Is Zero Scanners
The fake UPS email arrived five minutes after my real eBay order, pixel-perfect, and I clicked it. Then the screen turned red: infection stopped, infection stopped, infection stopped. That is what layers are for, because the one filter that always…
CybersecurityThe Infection That Kept Coming Back
Clean machine A. While you are cleaning machine B, machine C reinfects A. We played whack-a-mole against a network worm that never got tired, and lost, until we stopped treating machines and started treating the network.
CybersecurityThe Virus That Crashed Our Own Email Server
ILOVEYOU never encrypted a file or stole a password from us. It just sent mail, from hundreds of our machines at once, until our Exchange server ran out of disk space and died. Recovery took weeks, and it changed how…
CybersecurityThe Fake Printer Guy: Social Engineering in Person
He arrived to service the payment terminals, carrying replacements: our exact model, hacked to skim card data. What stopped him was not a firewall or a scanner. It was a policy simple enough to survive contact with a busy front…
CybersecuritySecurity Training That Trains Nothing (And the Kind That Works)
I have to take gamified security tests to consult for companies, and I have rewritten the book on phishing, literally: KnowBe4's Cyberheist, twice, credited alongside Roger A. Grimes. The gap between those two kinds of training is the gap between…
AuditsThe Consultant We Fired for Cracking Our Passwords
The PCI scan found L0phtCrack, a password cracker, sitting on one of our servers. We hunted it down expecting an intruder. We found our own consultant, who needed passwords to do his job and decided cracking them was faster than…
CybersecurityWhat Executives Get Wrong About Cybersecurity Books
Every executive who comes to me for a cybersecurity book wants to write a technical book. The book that builds careers is aimed at boards, customers, and the people who approve budgets, with the technical depth as rebar: everywhere, load-bearing,…