KrebsOnSecurity is celebrating its 14th anniversary today. I promised myself that this post would not devolve into another cybersecurity year review. I also don’t say much about what cyber horrors await us in 2024. But I would like to thank you, my readers, for your continued encouragement and support. Without it, my activities would not be possible.
As of this birthday, I have officially been an independent investigative journalist longer than I was a reporter for the Washington Post (1995-2009). Unless, of course, you count the years I worked as a newspaper carrier delivering the Washington Post to dozens of homes in Springfield, Virginia (as a teenager, I started working in a large (inherited the newspaper delivery route).
True story: When I was hired as a junior copy assistant at the Washington Post, all new employees (from mailroom and janitors to executives) were invited to a formal dinner with the publisher in the executive suite. don graham. The night of the new employee dinner, I had no clothes on, had not showered, and felt out of place. After munching on my food, I tried to sneak away to the elevator with another copying assistant, but was pulled aside by the man who had hired me. “Hey Brian, it’s not that early! Come see Don!”
I was 23 years old and didn’t know what to say other than to tell him the story of delivering newspapers. And I’ve already spent half my life working for him. Mr. Graham laughed and told me that was the best thing he had heard today. Of course, it made my week more enjoyable and made me feel even more at ease in the suit.
I remain grateful to WaPo for teaching me many skills, including how to distill technobabble into plain English for a general audience. And how to make people the focus of highly technical stories. Because whether you fully understand the technical details or not, the people and their eternal struggle are immediately relatable.
I can’t express how grateful I am that this independent reporting profession is still functioning, financially and otherwise. Most of the time I just put my head down, research something, and share what I find, but somehow a lot of people keep coming back to this site. As I like to say, I’m certainly not qualified to do anything else, so I hope they let me keep doing this job.
Another milestone. Currently, he has over 52,000 subscribers to his e-mail newsletter. Newsletter is a fancy term for a plain text email sent as soon as a new article is published here. Subscriptions are free and we won’t share anyone else’s email address. We also don’t send you any emails other than new article notifications (2-3 per week).
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In case you missed it, here are some of the most read articles published by KrebsOnSecurity in 2023. I hope everyone has a great 2024!
Ten Years Later, New Clues to Targeted Compromise
Experian makes it easy for anyone to be you
Experts fear fraudsters are decrypting keys stolen in LastPass breach
Why is .US used in many US phishing attempts?
Few Fortune 100 companies have security experts on their executive ranks.
Who is behind the Domain Network snail email scam?
Phishing domain suffers after Meta sues Freenom
Many public Salesforce sites leak personal data
Hackers claim to have breached T-Mobile more than 100 times in 2022
Identity thief bypasses Experian security to view credit report