top of page
-- 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
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
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
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
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
Next Steps
Turn What You've Learned Into Visibility.
The Free Human Risk Check provides a five-minute snapshot of potential human-driven cybersecurity risk across your organization.
bottom of page