When cyberattacks hit, the damage is never only digital.

It is personal.

Patients lose care. Communities lose trust. Staff work through exhaustion, and responders carry the blame long after the systems come back online. But behind every breach is also courage, resolve, and the people who kept going.

Stories

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School Payments Cut Off
School Payments Cut Off

Anna has worked as a school accountant for nearly three years, watching it shift gradually from paper to digital—checks first sent by post, then a growing web of centralized systems expected to keep running. When the cyberattack hit, it didn’t just take away her ability to log in and do her work for weeks. It erased a year of records entirely.

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Waiting on WannaCry
Waiting on WannaCry

Audrey was 31 when a knee injury collided with WannaCry, one of the most disruptive ransomware attacks in NHS history. What she couldn’t have known was that the attack would leave her waiting far longer for a diagnosis than the injury itself warranted.

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Inside LockBit’s Countdown
Inside LockBit’s Countdown

Zachary Lewis is CISO of the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis, one of the oldest pharmacy schools in the country. In 2023, the university was hit by LockBit, then the most active ransomware group in the world.

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Identity, Sold Forever
Identity, Sold Forever

A credit card arrived in the mail that Ashley never applied for—the first sign that someone had opened accounts in her name: credit cards, phones, a line of credit, even a bank account. She reported it everywhere she could, but her fight for justice was met with a wall of complacency, one institution after another calling it a “victimless crime.”

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Food Company Frozen
Food Company Frozen

Sunday is the worst day for a cyberattack to hit—government channels are dark, support is thin, and a company’s operations can grind to a halt with almost no one watching. For one food processing firm in Latvia, that quiet was the beginning of a crisis that would take months, and hundreds of encrypted machines, to unwind.

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Ransom Note, Mid-Exam
Ransom Note, Mid-Exam

A ransom note appeared on a screen during an exam. For one meteorology student, mid-final at Mississippi State, the first instinct wasn’t fear of hackers—it was panic over 2,900 words they hoped hadn’t just vanished. Behind the popup: a breach of Instructure’s Canvas platform that would ripple across nearly 9,000 institutions.

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