Most breaches start with a person. A year of cyber security training for a small office, including part-time staff, takes under five hours per employee. Sixty-two percent of the breaches Verizon examined for its 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report involved the human element. That means a clicked link, a reused password, a file sent to […]
Weekly Roundup: Top 5 Cyber Security News Stories, Week of September 14 to 20, 2026
1. Cisco Ships Emergency Patch for a Perfect 10.0 Identity Services Engine Zero-Day Cisco disclosed CVE-2026-76460, a CVSS 10.0 authentication bypass in the Identity Services Engine and ISE-PIC API that lets an unauthenticated remote attacker reach the management interface and execute commands as root. The flaw was already being exploited in the wild when the […]
Why Software Updates Are the Cheapest Security You Have
On May 12, 2017, ransomware called WannaCry moved through the British National Health Service and forced hospitals to turn patients away, canceling roughly 19,000 appointments and operations in the days that followed. The flaw it traveled through was neither secret nor new. Microsoft had published the fix on March 14 of that year, 59 days […]
Five Old Scams That Technology Brought Back
When it comes to scams, everything that’s old is new again. Last week I wrote about a package nobody ordered. The scheme behind it, brushing, is years old, and on its own it was never much more than review fraud. What made it worth a column was the card tucked in the box with a […]
Brushing: Don’t Scan That QR Code in the Mystery Package
On August 20, the Federal Trade Commission put out a short consumer alert about a package. Not a data breach, not a ransomware crew, not a foreign intelligence service. A package. Baby wipes, maybe, or toothpaste, or a small envelope of flower seeds. It shows up at your door with your name and address on […]
Critical Infrastructure Like Water Plants Are a Hacking Target Now
Hackers reached critical infrastructure in at least a dozen states in under two weeks. Kentucky’s small utilities should assume they are on the same list. In late July, the Clayton County Water Authority outside Atlanta watched its water pressure fall. The authority serves about 300,000 people. It issued a boil water advisory. A broken main […]