Blog
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The Malware That Ate Augusta
ARcare, the Augusta, Arkansas health network, used its April 2022 notice to patients to describe an incident as involving “a limited amount” of personal and medical information, and framed the mailing as something it was doing “out of an abundance of caution.” The press release went up on April 25, 2022, but it didn’t say…
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The Fix Was Free. Finding Every Copy Was Not.
Government websites across Europe went dark on October 21, their operators pulling systems offline within hours of a PHP security release that fixed two critical remote-code-execution bugs. The patch was public within hours of the disclosure, which means somebody competent did the hard work in advance and handed everyone else a tested fix. Plenty of…
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SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 Are Three Answers to Three Different Questions
A story plays out on r/soc2 every few weeks. A company has been handing every prospect a SOC 2 report, things are going fine, and then a customer’s finance team comes back asking specifically for a SOC 1. Panic spreads through the company’s Slack channels, followed by a post asking what the difference even is….
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AT&T Wrote a $177 Million Check and Most Customers Will Cash One for Eight Bucks
When Senior Judge Sidney Fitzwater signed off on AT&T’s $177 million data breach settlement on October 2, 2026, the actual numbers from the Memorandum Opinion and Order got lost in the headlines promising payments “up to $7,500.” The real numbers put most claimants in line for between $6.50 and $8.10. Two Breaches, One Bill The…
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Cheap Cyber Insurance Has Never Been More Expensive
Cyber insurance rates have now fallen four years in a row, down roughly 5% year to date in 2026 after a 13% drop in 2025, according to Insurance Journal. If you’re renewing a policy this quarter, congratulations, you have the upper hand on price. Now the bad news. Over that same period, average claim severity…
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Eight Bucks a Patient
Brockton Neighborhood Health Center runs a network of clinics serving about 39,000 patients around Boston, with roughly $84 million in annual revenue and about 830 employees. In November 2024, a ransomware crew called Interlock got in and took what it wanted. Six weeks later, Brockton sent letters to 97,488 current and former patients (the active…
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Two Stories About the Same December
On October 6, I wrote up Judge P. Casey Pitts’s decision denying most of a motion to dismiss Apollo Information Systems Corp.’s claims, arguing the ruling deserved a busy security leader’s attention. The case looks different today. In Document 83, the defendants answer the complaint, concede most of the facts Apollo alleged, and then sue…
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Cyber Risk Is Not a Special Snowflake
Walk into a CFO’s office and announce that you’ve got a 9.8 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) for a production server, and watch what happens. Nothing happens. The CFO has eleventy billion other things to think about and no way to judge whether a 9.8 is a five-alarm fire or a rounding error….
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2026 Is Shaping Up to Be the Worst Year to Look for a Cybersecurity Job in Four Years
If you’re job hunting in security right now, the market has fewer doors to knock on than at any point in the past four years. The CyberSN Jobs Report counted 235,786 US cybersecurity job postings between January and September 2026, a 26.4% drop from the 320,210 posted over the same nine months of 2025. Eight…
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What $5.5 million buys when a million Social Security numbers walk out the door
Roughly a million Americans had their names, mailing addresses, financial account numbers, and Social Security numbers (SSNs) removed from a computer network belonging to a company most of them had never heard of. Their credit unions knew Doxim well enough to hand over member data for document management and customer communications, which is how a…
