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-- INSIGHTS
The Human Side of Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity incidents are rarely just technical. They are shaped by employee decisions, security culture, phishing and social engineering, AI use, and the way organizations respond to risk.
HumanSecIQ Insights examines those factors through practical guidance, analysis, and real-world cybersecurity incidents.
LATEST
Latest Insights
Insights, guidance, and practical perspectives on human risk, security culture, and AI governance.
Co-op Cyber Incident 2025: Third-Party Access and the Decision to Disconnect
The third UK retailer hit in a two-week wave detected its intruders in hours, cut its own network before the ransomware could fire, and never paid a penny. It still lost the data of all 6.5 million members and £206 million in sales. This is what the good outcome costs. Case type: Social engineering / attempted ransomware / data theft Identified: Apr 22, 2025 Disclosed: Apr 30, 2025 Attribution: Scattered Spider affiliates / DragonForce RaaS Every breach in this serie
Marks & Spencer Cyber Incident 2025: Help Desk Social Engineering and Identity Risk
The first and hardest-hit target of the UK retail wave. A few minutes of impersonation at an outsourced service desk, weeks of quiet access, every domain password reportedly harvested, and then the encryptor. M&S never said whether it paid. Its accounts said statutory profit fell from $509 million to $4.4 million. Case type: Social engineering / ransomware Identified: Apr 19–21, 2025 Disclosed: Apr 22, 2025 Attribution: Scattered Spider (reported) / DragonForce ransomware
Harrods Cyber Incident 2025: When Identity Defenses Actually Work
The third target of the UK retail wave cut its own internet access, kept trading, and said almost nothing. The wave broke against it. Months later, 430,000 customer records left anyway, through a supplier Harrods has never named. Both halves are the story Case type: Attempted intrusion / third-party data breach Identified: Late Apr 2025; Sept 2025 Disclosed: May 1, 2025; Sept 26, 2025 Attribution: Wave linked to Scattered Spider / DragonForce; Sept actor unnamed By the
HUMAN RISK
SECURITY CULTURE
AI GOVERNANCE
Breach Analysis
Co-op Cyber Incident 2025: Third-Party Access and the Decision to Disconnect
The third UK retailer hit in a two-week wave detected its intruders in hours, cut its own network before the ransomware could fire, and never paid a penny. It still lost the data of all 6.5 million members and £206 million in sales. This is what the good outcome costs. Case type: Social engineering / attempted ransomware / data theft Identified: Apr 22, 2025 Disclosed: Apr 30, 2025 Attribution: Scattered Spider affiliates / DragonForce RaaS Every breach in this serie
Rebecca Guy
Jul 29, 20255 min read
Marks & Spencer Cyber Incident 2025: Help Desk Social Engineering and Identity Risk
The first and hardest-hit target of the UK retail wave. A few minutes of impersonation at an outsourced service desk, weeks of quiet access, every domain password reportedly harvested, and then the encryptor. M&S never said whether it paid. Its accounts said statutory profit fell from $509 million to $4.4 million. Case type: Social engineering / ransomware Identified: Apr 19–21, 2025 Disclosed: Apr 22, 2025 Attribution: Scattered Spider (reported) / DragonForce ransomware
Rebecca Guy
Jun 17, 20255 min read
Harrods Cyber Incident 2025: When Identity Defenses Actually Work
The third target of the UK retail wave cut its own internet access, kept trading, and said almost nothing. The wave broke against it. Months later, 430,000 customer records left anyway, through a supplier Harrods has never named. Both halves are the story Case type: Attempted intrusion / third-party data breach Identified: Late Apr 2025; Sept 2025 Disclosed: May 1, 2025; Sept 26, 2025 Attribution: Wave linked to Scattered Spider / DragonForce; Sept actor unnamed By the
Rebecca Guy
Jun 3, 20255 min read
Change Healthcare Breach 2024: Identity Controls and Industry-Wide Risk
One legacy portal without multi-factor authentication. Nine quiet days. Then a third of American healthcare stopped being able to pay for itself, 190 million people's medical data left, and a $22 million ransom was stolen by the ransomware gang from its own affiliate, who extorted again anyway. Case type: Ransomware / critical infrastructure disruption Identified: Feb 21, 2024 Disclosed: Feb 21, 2024 Attribution: ALPHV/BlackCat affiliate; second extortion via RansomHub In
Rebecca Guy
Nov 5, 20245 min read
Snowflake Breaches 2024: Credential Theft and Shared Responsibility
No one hacked Snowflake. Attackers took passwords harvested by commodity malware, some stolen back in 2020 and never changed, and logged into customer data warehouses that asked for nothing more. Roughly 165 organizations, 560 million Ticketmaster records, nearly every AT&T customer's call history, and a guilty plea two years later. Case type: Credential abuse / cloud data theft / extortion Identified: May 23, 2024 Disclosed: May 31, 2024 Attribution: UNC5537 / ShinyHu
Rebecca Guy
Aug 1, 20245 min read
CDK Global Cyberattack 2024: Vendor Concentration and Industry-Wide Disruption
One software company went down and roughly 15,000 car dealerships went back to pen and paper in the middle of quarter-end. A restoration that got knocked down mid-recovery, a reported $25 million ransom, and over a billion dollars in dealer losses that the ransom did nothing to prevent. Case type: Ransomware / SaaS supply chain outage Identified: Jun 18, 2024 Disclosed: Jun 19, 2024 Attribution: BlackSuit (Royal / Conti lineage) On the morning of June 19, 2024, thousan
Rebecca Guy
Jul 23, 20245 min read
MOVEit Transfer Breach 2023: Third-Party Risk at Scale
No one at 2,700 organizations clicked anything. Over a single holiday weekend, a zero-day in a trusted file-transfer product let a ransomware crew steal data at industrial scale, from companies, agencies, and universities, many of which had never heard of MOVEit until it took their data. Case type: Supply chain / zero-day exploitation Identified: May 28–30, 2023 Disclosed: May 31, 2023 Attribution: Clop (TA505 / FIN11) Organizations spend enormous effort securing thei
Rebecca Guy
Jan 9, 20245 min read
23andMe Breach 2023: Credential Stuffing and the Cost of Password Reuse
Nobody broke into 23andMe. Old passwords from other companies' breaches were tried at the front door for five months, and about 14,000 still worked. A feature built to connect genetic relatives did the rest, exposing 6.9 million people, most of whom did nothing wrong. Case type: Credential stuffing / data scraping Identified: Oct 5, 2023 Disclosed: Oct 6, 2023 Attribution: Actor using the handle "Golem" Organizations invest heavily in cybersecurity technologies, security
Rebecca Guy
Dec 9, 20235 min read
MGM Resorts Breach 2023: Business Continuity and Operational Resilience
Part one told how a ten-minute phone call breached MGM. This is what the next ten days cost: dark slot floors, handwritten check-ins, a refusal to pay, and a $100 million lesson in what operational resilience actually means. Case type: Ransomware / operational disruption Identified: Sept 10, 2023 Disclosed: Sept 11, 2023 Attribution: Scattered Spider / ALPHV Part one of this case examined how a ten-minute phone call gave attackers the keys to MGM Resorts. This companion pi
Rebecca Guy
Oct 17, 20235 min read
MGM Resorts Breach 2023: Help Desk Social Engineering and Operational Risk
A social engineering attack against MGM Resorts turned an identity-verification failure into widespread operational disruption. The incident shows how help desk processes, trusted identities, and human decisions can become part of the security boundary.
Rebecca Guy
Oct 10, 20234 min read
Caesars Entertainment Breach 2023: Social Engineering, Vendor Risk, and Extortion
Three weeks before MGM went dark, the same attackers called a help desk that worked for Caesars, and walked away with the loyalty database. No outage, no headlines at first, a negotiated ransom, and zero guarantees the data was ever deleted. Case type: Social engineering / vendor compromise / extortion Identified: Sept 7, 2023 Disclosed: Sept 14, 2023 Attribution: Scattered Spider (UNC3944) On August 18, 2023, attackers associated with Scattered Spider targeted the help desk
Rebecca Guy
Sep 23, 20234 min read
LastPass Breach 2022: Credential Security, Access, and Vendor Risk
What began as a compromised developer environment became a second-stage intrusion into cloud backup storage. The LastPass breach shows how credentials, privileged access, third-party software, and interconnected systems can turn one compromise into broader organizational risk.
Rebecca Guy
Jan 12, 20235 min read
Uber Breach 2022: MFA Fatigue and the Human Cost of One Approved Request
A contractor's stolen credentials, repeated MFA prompts, and one approved request gave an attacker access to Uber's internal systems. This breach shows how identity controls can fail when attackers exploit both technology and predictable human behavior.
Rebecca Guy
Nov 7, 20224 min read
Optus Breach 2022: API Exposure and the Cost of Weak Governance
No phishing, no malware, no stolen credentials. A four-year-old coding error, a forgotten domain, and an API that never asked who was calling exposed the records of roughly 9.5 million Australians. Some breaches aren't broken into. They're walked into. Case type: Data exposure / unauthenticated API Identified: Sept 20, 2022 Disclosed: Sept 22, 2022 Attribution: Unidentified actor, handle "optusdata" Cybersecurity breaches are often measured in records exposed, systems compro
Rebecca Guy
Oct 4, 20226 min read
Cisco Breach 2022: MFA Fatigue and the Limits of a Trusted Login
Stolen credentials, repeated MFA prompts, and voice phishing gave an attacker access to Cisco's corporate VPN. The incident shows how trusted identities can become attack paths when authentication depends on both technical controls and human decisions.
Rebecca Guy
Sep 1, 20224 min read
Twilio Breach 2022: SMS Phishing and the Limits of MFA
SMS messages impersonating Twilio's IT team directed employees to fraudulent login pages, allowing attackers to capture credentials and access internal systems. The breach shows how phishing-resistant authentication and identity controls matter when attackers target the login process itself.
Rebecca Guy
Aug 15, 20224 min read
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