as we all know, humans are often the weakest part of the security chain.”
Those are the words of Reddit CTO Christopher Slowe, who was quick to play the blame game in a post announcing that Reddit experienced a breach of internal data last week. He explained that the platform was compromised after an attacker sent “plausible-sounding prompts” to employees that redirected them to a website impersonating Reddit’s intranet portal in an attempt to steal credentials. Reddit said users’ data was safe.
Hackers successfully obtained an employee’s credentials, Slowe said, before calling out said employee — who decisively self-reported the incident to Reddit’s security team — as the “weakest link” in the company’s security defenses. (Ironically, Slowe went on to advise users to “update your password every couple of months,” a practice that is no longer recommended by most cybersecurity experts.)
Reddit isn’t alone in pointing the finger following a breach, and many organizations have defaulted to a blame culture when it comes to data security.
CircleCI, a company whose development products are popular with software engineers, has urged users to rotate their secrets following a breach of the company’s systems. The San Francisco–headquartered DevOps company said in an advisory published late Wednesday that it is currently investigating the security incident — its most recent in recent years. “We wanted to make you […]
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has confirmed that it’s investigating malicious cyber activity on its own network. CNN reported on Friday that hackers compromised an FBI computer system at the agency’s New York field office, citing people briefed with the matter. The brief report added that the incident involved a computer system used in investigations of […]
Ever since Elon Musk spent $44 billion on Twitter and laid off a large percentage of the company’s staff, there have been concerns about data breaches. Now it seems a security incident that predates Musk’s takeover is causing headaches. This week, it emerged that hackers released a trove of 200 million email addresses and their […]
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