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Here's everything important that happened in the cybers this week.
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The Ransom Was the Cheap Part
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In March 2023, LockBit demanded $10 million from MCNA Dental. Management refused, the attackers published 700 GB of stolen data two days later, and everyone moved on. That refusal tends to get framed as courage in breach retrospectives. It wasn't. It was a capital allocation decision made without anyone pricing the alternatives, and the invoice is now public. Call it …
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Honeywell Paid $2 Million to Make a Quantum Problem Go Quiet
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On December 14, 2020, one day after the SolarWinds breach became public knowledge, monitoring software on a Honeywell network started firing alerts. Between 9:30 in the morning and midnight Central Time, it logged: An Orion-initiated connection modifying the configuration of an employee device More than 1,200 megabytes of data moving from the network's central server to a compromised Orion server …
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How to Build a Business Case for Cybersecurity Investments
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In August 2026, California's Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI) ordered Academy Mortgage to pay $825,000 for failing to protect the personal information of 284,443 people. That penalty was the smallest line on a much larger invoice. My estimate, built from IBM's 2026 Cost of a Data Breach benchmarks scaled to Academy's size, puts the true cost of the …
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What the AI Kill Switch Act Actually Switches Off
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Two things landed this week that got me checking back in on H.R. 9917, the AI Kill Switch Act that Reps. Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced on July 23. The first was a CyberScoop op-ed arguing the bill repeats the Clipper Chip's mistakes. The second was a PBS NewsHour segment I'd watched on AI agents going rogue, where Gary …
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The Best Data Is on Sale at the Liquidation Auction
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The final round of bidding for the internal records of a dead airline came down to two companies. Google offered $10 million, and the runner-up, at $7.5 million, was Mercor, an AI training-data firm. Neither company flies planes, runs turnaround operations, or collects archives. Both train AI models. That auction happened on August 14 in the Chapter 11 case of …
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Next webinar
Who actually carries the liability when your AI goes wrong? I'm on a panel with two attorneys who are super-fun! Sept 17, 1 PM ET. Register.
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Lists I'm now on
Words elsewhere
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Thanks, and have a great long weekend! This newsletter is published every Friday I'm in the office.
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