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.
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