AI financing jitters are hammering cybersecurity stocks far harder than the broader Nasdaq, leaving investors to wonder whether the sector’s demand story can survive the selloff or whether the AI trade just entered its painful second half.
Cybersecurity stocks are giving back ground as concerns about how AI spending gets funded spread across technology. In afternoon trading, Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ:PANW | PANW Price Prediction) stock is down 7%, trading at $343.31. Meanwhile, SentinelOne (NYSE:S) stock is sliding even harder, down 9% to $21.29.
Zscaler (NASDAQ:ZS) stock is down 6% to $206.39, a milder drop than Palo Alto stock and SentinelOne stock are posting. Despite the shared selloff, the businesses differ: Palo Alto sells firewalls and a broad platform of security software, while SentinelOne sells endpoint protection and Zscaler sells cloud-delivered secure network access.
The selling extends across the wider cybersecurity basket, as the First Trust NASDAQ Cybersecurity ETF (NASDAQ:CIBR) is down 4%. Large-cap tech is holding up better; the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) is down 1.72%. That leaves Palo Alto stock, SentinelOne stock and Zscaler stock falling harder than the cybersecurity fund, which is sliding far more than the NASDAQ 100 tracker.
AI Financing Questions Weigh on Cybersecurity Stocks
The decline in Palo Alto stock extends a pullback in cybersecurity stocks from record highs set earlier this month. A broad technology selloff and questions about how AI spending gets funded are weighing on the sector. It’s a sharp reversal. Palo Alto stock, SentinelOne stock and Zscaler stock are caught in this reversal after the companies’ recent sales pitches leaned heavily on zero trust, agentic AI security and AI-driven security operations.
On Thursday, Citi raised its price target on Palo Alto stock and kept its Buy rating. Citi’s analysts stated that the firm’s chief information officer survey showed improving security spending, with AI deployments driving additional investment. Even that price target raise hasn’t kept Palo Alto stock from sliding with the rest of the sector.

Palo Alto’s own results have backed that demand story. In fiscal Q4 2026, Palo Alto grew revenue 34.5% year over year to $3.41 billion, while its Next-Generation Security annual recurring revenue jumped 63% to $9.1 billion. Nikesh Arora was Palo Alto’s chief executive at the time. He stated in the results release: “The latest advancements in AI are elevating cybersecurity to the top of the CIO priority list.”
Beyond firewalls, Palo Alto’s platform covers cloud security, the Cortex security operations suite, AI security and the Idira identity business. Console, an AI-native platform for agentic workflows, is Palo Alto’s latest acquisition aimed at expanding Cortex. At Palo Alto, remaining performance obligations rose 34% to $21.2 billion in Q4.
Demand Story Collides With a Marked-Down AI Trade
For Palo Alto, the bull case rests on security spending that Citi describes as improving while companies deploy AI, which could keep customers consolidating onto its platform. Management’s fiscal 2027 outlook calls for Palo Alto revenue of $14.1 billion to $14.2 billion, or growth of 23% to 24%. However, the risk for Palo Alto is that cybersecurity stocks are being marked down with the rest of the AI trade despite that demand.
As of June 30, Palo Alto stock was the First Trust fund’s largest disclosed holding. SentinelOne and Zscaler shares were also among its positions, alongside the maker of the FortiGate firewall lineup.
Cybersecurity Rally Faces a Major Test
Palo Alto’s next quarterly report could show whether the AI-driven security demand Citi described holds up, and traders can watch for whether the CIBR First Trust fund keeps sliding faster than the Invesco QQQ Trust.
What remains uncertain for SentinelOne stock and Zscaler stock is the direction of the broader AI trade. SentinelOne markets AI security tools such as Purple AI and Prompt Security, while Zscaler presents zero trust as the architecture for securing agentic AI workloads (riding an AI rally has two halves, the entry and the exit, both of which we covered in a free handbook). Investors should consider keeping their position sizes modest in these cybersecurity stocks until the AI financing question finds a resolution.

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Bank of America has had to spend big on IT in response to an AI security audit and findings that its anti-money-laundering (AML) controls were lacking.

The bank was fined a whopping $1.2 billion for money laundering offences this week, after banking authorities identified a lax attitude to compliance.

“We understand the seriousness of compliance, and we are responsible for getting it right,” Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said on a conference call to discuss the company’s third-quarter financial results. “We have invested billions of dollars in technology and dedicated thousands of employees to combat financial crime,” he said, adding that “a couple hundred million” of that spending in the third quarter was on “remediation for the AML”.


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TEHRAN — An Israeli advertising company turned the banner ad into a hacking tool, and for at least two years the companies running the world’s ad platforms failed to stop it.Two investigations published October 15, by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and the New York security firm Confiant, describe how Discover-Tech, founded in 2020, let surveillance vendors identify internet users and infect chosen ones without a single click.
The company’s platform, Controlium, profiled users in bulk and stripped away their anonymity. Citizen Lab calls the technique AdFection. A person opens a website or app, and dozens of firms bid in milliseconds for the ad slot. If Discover-Tech wins, it learns who is looking. If that person is on a client’s list, spyware can follow within seconds.
The ads sold phones, earbuds, games and telecom plans. Nothing about them looked wrong. They only had to load.
Citizen Lab examined roughly four billion ad records and found Discover-Tech material on more than 120,000 websites and 75,000 apps.
Confiant counted at least 10 million ads a day. Through cookie matching, its cofounder Jerome Dangu said, the firm could track people beyond its own ads. “Very likely hundreds of millions of people would have been touched by Discover-Tech,” he said.
Al Jazeera in the crosshairs
The best-documented victims worked for Al Jazeera. Between 2024 and 2025, 45 Windows computers at the Qatari broadcaster were infected with spyware from Candiru, the Israeli vendor the U.S. Commerce Department blacklisted in 2021 over its use against officials, journalists, activists and academics.
Al Jazeera’s own technicians had spotted strange activity and brought in Citizen Lab, which confirmed the attack from the network’s logs.
The implant can read files, emails and messages, log keystrokes, take screenshots and switch on microphones and cameras. It is understood to have cost several million dollars.
Al Jazeera called it an assault on press freedom and demanded accountability. It has been here before. In 2020, Citizen Lab found that 36 phones belonging to the network’s journalists and executives had been hacked with Pegasus, made by another Israeli firm, NSO Group.
A whole population under watch
Dangu said the Palestinian territories were especially saturated. Almost any site there carried a Discover-Tech ad, he said, giving the firm “a very complete visibility on the digital activities of an entire country.”
Israel already controls movement, borders and much of daily life in the occupied territories. This added a layer inside the browser.
The same ads appeared in networks tied to the Pentagon, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations, NATO, the European Commission and more than a dozen national governments, along with chipmakers such as Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron.
They also reached the International Criminal Court, which issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in 2024.
Platforms act late
Google says it removed Discover-Tech “for systematically violating our policies.” Europe’s Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) suspended the firm last week after an audit, and Comcast’s Beeswax dropped it.
Yandex did not comment. Discover-Tech and Candiru’s owners did not answer Reuters. Confiant noted that ads it tied to Candiru were a tiny fraction of the volume.
Citizen Lab’s Wolfie Christl called it disastrous that major vendors missed the operation for years, and urged U.S. and European regulators to investigate.
Candiru has been on a U.S. blacklist for five years. The pipeline that carried its code ran through American-owned platforms until outside researchers forced the issue.


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Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach joins Stuart Varney to discuss why eight states are suing OpenAI. Kobach alleges ChatGPT misled parents and endangered children by encouraging self-harm and providing bad medical advice.
Eight states are suing OpenAI over child safety concerns regarding its chatbot, ChatGPT. Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach tells Stuart Varney that the company deceived parents by claiming the product is safe for minors. Kobach alleges ChatGPT endangered children by telling them to engage in self-harm and coaching them on suicide, leading to at least one death.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 16, 2026

CONTACT: [email protected]

ICYMI: Vivek Ramaswamy Airs Ad Featuring Convicted Child Sex Offender

COLUMBUS, OH– On Wednesday, new reporting revealed that Vivek Ramaswamy  aired an ad featuring a child sex predator who was sentenced to 8 years in prison.

See coverage below:

On the Airwaves:

On CW:

Anchor: “The campaign for Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy called out this week for a new ad campaign that features a woman from Amherst worried about rising property tax bills in the future of her farm.”

Anchor: “The controversy, included in that ad, are some shots of her husband, Vernon Edwards, a convicted sex offender. He was convicted of those sex crimes back in 2006 for molesting several young girls in his family.”

On WKRC:

Anchor: “Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy found himself having to answer some questions today about a new ad campaign featuring a woman from Amherst worried about rising property tax bills and the future of her farm.”

Anchor: “Also included in the ad were a few shots of the woman’s husband, Vernon Edwards, who was convicted of gross sexual imposition in 2006 for molesting several of his nieces under the age of 13.”

In Print:

The Bulwark: Ramaswamy Campaign Ad Accidentally Featured a Sex Offender

The [ad] featured a woman from Amherst (a Cleveland suburb) named Patricia “Patty” Edwards, who is fretting about losing the family farm.

But while the topic may resonate with voters, the featured couple has created complications for Ramaswamy’s camp.

That’s because Vernon Edwards—Patty’s husband, who appears a few times in b-roll alongside her in the ad—is a registered sex offender.

According to court records, Edwards entered into a plea deal in October 2006, in which he pleaded guilty to two counts of “gross sexual imposition”—that is, according to Ohio statute, nonconsensual sexual contact—with a minor. Though there were allegations that he committed similar acts against several nieces, he was ultimately charged in a case involving one of them, a girl under the age of 13, because the statute of limitations had expired in the other instances. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.

…The campaign also quietly took down the social video featuring Vernon Edwards, as did at least one Republican Ohio state representative who had shared the video as well—suggesting a coordinated effort to wipe the record.

The inclusion of Vernon Edwards in the original social video and the television ad raises questions about the aspiring governor’s campaign—specifically, whether it is conducting due diligence. Ramaswamy is running for chief executive of the Buckeye State—and asking Ohioans to trust his judgment enough to make him governor—on the strength of his personal narrative, which pictures him as a competent business leader.

In a phone call with The Bulwark, Patty said that the campaign reached out to her about recording the ad. She stressed that the commercial was about her story and had nothing to do with her husband.

“I am a normal American citizen, and the ad was with me and with Vivek. That’s who was involved with us, and that’s who they reached out to,” she said. As for her husband’s past history, she called the accusations against him “false,” saying that the prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence. “Even if that [the allegations] were true,” she added, “the man did do his time back to society, and he has been an exemplary citizen at this point. And again, Vivek reached out to me. I am not accused of anything. I am an American citizen. I’m allowed to do this.”

Campaigns typically vet the individuals they put forward in ads to ensure both that their stories are true and that there are no red flags in their biographies. Among the records that could have been discovered were court documents showing a Vernon Edwards from the same Amherst address as Patty listed in the Lorain County sex offender registry. In addition, a Google search would have shown Edwards appearing to wear the exact same patriotic shirt in the sex offender registry as the one Ramaswamy complimented him for wearing when they met at the fair.

Chronicle-Telegram: Ramaswamy campaign to remove convicted Lorain County sex offender from property tax ad

A campaign ad for Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy filmed partly at the Lorain County Fair has been edited to take out a brief appearance by a convicted sex offender.

“Vernon Edwards greeted Ramaswamy with a handshake, and the candidate complimented his patriotic shirt,” TheBulwark.com reported.

The campaign took down social media posts featuring Vernon Edwards, the website reported. It noted that campaigns often do background checks and research on people they feature in campaign ads.

A Google search for Vernon Edwards “would have shown (him) appearing to wear the exact same patriotic shirt in the sex offender registry as the one Ramaswamy complimented him for wearing when they met at the fair,” TheBulwark.com reported.

Vernon Edwards, then 60, pleaded guilty in October 2006 to two counts of gross sexual imposition, both felonies, in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court. He was sentenced to eight years in prison and labeled a sexual predator.

Gross sexual imposition is the crime of having nonconsensual sexual contact with someone, and Vernon Edwards was accused of assaulting an underage female family member, according to court records.

He appealed his sentence, but the 8th District Court of Appeals upheld it.

“At the sentencing hearing, it was revealed that Edwards had molested several other” alleged victims, Judge Patricia Ann Blackmon wrote in the appeals court’s 2007 decision. “However, due to the expiration of the statute of limitations, charges were never brought” on behalf of the other victims.

Late in 2006, Vernon Edwards also pleaded guilty in Lorain County Common Pleas Court to one count of gross sexual imposition. Judge Mark Betleski sentenced him to one year in prison, to run concurrently with the prison time he received in Cuyahoga County.

In 2016, after his release from prison, Vernon Edwards tried to get his sexual predator status overturned in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court. Judge Nancy Margaret Russo denied the request, according to court records.

Raw Story: GOP candidate scurries after sex offender repeatedly pops up in his TV ad: report

Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign is reworking a new TV ad after revelations that a man shown in the spot is a registered sex offender.

The ad focuses on property taxes and features Patricia “Patty” Edwards of Amherst, a Cleveland suburb, who talks about her fear of losing her family farm. The Bulwark reported that her husband, Vernon Edwards, who appears in background footage, pleaded guilty in October 2006 to two counts of gross sexual imposition involving a girl under 13 and was sentenced to eight years in prison.

He is listed on the Lorain County sex offender registry.

After commenting, the campaign also deleted the fair video from social media, according to The Bulwark. At least one Republican state representative who had shared it took it down as well.

The Bulwark noted that basic vetting could have caught the problem. Court records list a Vernon Edwards at the same Amherst address as Patty, and his sex offender registry photo appears to show him wearing the same patriotic shirt Ramaswamy praised at the fair.

The New Republic: Vivek Ramaswamy Features Sex Offender in Campaign Ad

In September, Ohio GOP gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy posted (and quickly deleted) a video on social media featuring himself shaking hands with a registered sex offender. He again featured that same man in a television campaign ad a month later, according to reporting from The Bulwark.

In 2006, Amherst, Ohio, resident Vernon Edwards pleaded guilty to “gross sexual imposition,” which according to Ohio law involves sexual contact with a minor. He was charged in a case involving a 13-year-old girl, though he faced many similar allegations against his nieces.

While Edwards didn’t have a speaking role in Ramaswamy’s commercial, he’s included in the B-roll footage as his wife Patty speaks about how the embattled gubernatorial candidate lowered her property taxes.

Daily Mail: Vivek Ramaswamy scrambles to pull ad after mortifying blunder featured registered sex offender

Vivek Ramaswamy has pulled a campaign ad after discovering that the husband of an Ohio woman featured in the commercial is a registered sex offender.

But her husband, who appears several times in the background of the footage, is creating an unexpected headache for Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign.

During that meeting, Ramaswamy shook hands with Vernon Edwards and complimented his patriotic shirt before Patty Edwards approached the candidate to discuss her concerns about property taxes.

‘Love that shirt! Nice patriotic shirt; I like that,’ Ramaswamy says as he shakes Edwards’ hand.

Court records show Vernon Edwards pleaded guilty in October 2006 to two counts of gross sexual imposition involving his niece under the age of 13.

He was sentenced to eight years in prison and is listed on Ohio’s sex offender registry.

According to the court records, allegations involving other relatives were not pursued because the statute of limitations had expired.

The episode raises questions about the campaign’s vetting process, given that court documents and Ohio’s sex offender registry contained information about Edwards’ criminal history.

WKRC: Questions raised after convicted sex offender appears in Ramaswamy campaign ad

The campaign for Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy found itself having to answer questions about a new campaign ad.

Also included in the ad were a few shots of the woman’s husband Vernon Edwards, who was convicted of gross sexual imposition in 2006 for molesting several of his nieces under the age of 13.

Online:

@JimSwiftDC: New from me: Ramaswamy Campaign Ad Accidentally Featured a Sex Offender

@samstein: NEW: Vivek Ramaswamy accidentally featured himself shaking hands with a sex offender in a social video and put that same offender in a campaign ad.

@factpostnews: Vivek Ramaswamy aired a campaign ad featuring a registered sex offender.

@HQNewsNow: Ohio Republican Vivek Ramaswamy just featured a registered sex offender in a recent campaign ad. Ramaswamy’s campaign has also taken $100,000 in donations from Jeffrey Epstein associates.

@DailyMail: Vivek Ramaswamy scrambles to pull ad after mortifying blunder featured registered sex offender

@NewsWire_US: Vivek Ramaswamy Ohio Governor Campaign Ad Accidentally Featured a Sex Offender — The Bulwark

@PollTracker2024: #OhioGovernor. The Bulwark: Vivek Ramaswamy Campaign Ad Accidentally Featured a Sex Offender. The campaign says it’s recutting the spot, which was meant to be about the plague of high property taxes.

@DemGovs: OHIO: Vivek Ramaswamy featured a registered sex offender in his latest campaign ad.

@newrepublic: Vivek Ramaswamy Features Sex Offender in Campaign Ad

@darreldrowland: Ooops… Vivek Ramaswamy Campaign Ad Accidentally Included a Sex Offender. The campaign says it’s recutting the spot, which was meant to be about the plague of high property taxes

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Through a forum post targeting the criminal underground, B1ack Stash recently declared the suspension of approximately 8 million stolen CVV2 records from its active inventory. The stated reason: sellers on the platform had been reselling cards purchased from B1ack’s Stash in competing shops, violating the marketplace’s internal rules.
Rather than simply removing the affected cards, the operator/s behind the marketplace chose to release approximately 4.6 million of them as a free download, directing users to the marketplace’s Freebies section. The post also extended an olive branch to sellers deemed trustworthy, offering them a “second chance” through a support ticket system, and teased the upcoming launch of a new card database.
The announcement was written in both English and Russian, consistent with the marketplace’s established communication style, targeting an international criminal audience.
What Does the Leaked Data Look Like?
The sample data shared as part of this release follows a structured format typical of carding databases. Each record contains:

Full credit/debit card number (16-digit PAN)
Expiration date (month/year)
CVV2 code
Cardholder’s full name
Billing address (street, city, state, ZIP code, country)
Email address
Phone number
IP address

The data appears to be sourced from e-commerce skimming or phishing operations, given the presence of full cardholder identity details alongside payment data.

Sample from the credit card data dump
SOCRadar’s analysis found the records consistent with genuine compromise data, passing BIN and algorithm checks. After filtering duplicates, expired cards, and previously known entries, an estimated 4.3 million cards appear to be net new and potentially actionable. SOCRadar’s validation of the dataset is ongoing.


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Through a forum post targeting the criminal underground, B1ack Stash recently declared the suspension of approximately 8 million stolen CVV2 records from its active inventory. The stated reason: sellers on the platform had been reselling cards purchased from B1ack’s Stash in competing shops, violating the marketplace’s internal rules.
Rather than simply removing the affected cards, the operator/s behind the marketplace chose to release approximately 4.6 million of them as a free download, directing users to the marketplace’s Freebies section. The post also extended an olive branch to sellers deemed trustworthy, offering them a “second chance” through a support ticket system, and teased the upcoming launch of a new card database.
The announcement was written in both English and Russian, consistent with the marketplace’s established communication style, targeting an international criminal audience.
What Does the Leaked Data Look Like?
The sample data shared as part of this release follows a structured format typical of carding databases. Each record contains:

Full credit/debit card number (16-digit PAN)
Expiration date (month/year)
CVV2 code
Cardholder’s full name
Billing address (street, city, state, ZIP code, country)
Email address
Phone number
IP address

The data appears to be sourced from e-commerce skimming or phishing operations, given the presence of full cardholder identity details alongside payment data.

Sample from the credit card data dump
SOCRadar’s analysis found the records consistent with genuine compromise data, passing BIN and algorithm checks. After filtering duplicates, expired cards, and previously known entries, an estimated 4.3 million cards appear to be net new and potentially actionable. SOCRadar’s validation of the dataset is ongoing.


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Cybersecurity stocks sold off again on Friday amid a hacker vulnerability involving a Palo Alto Networks (PANW) network firewall platform noted in a federal agency registry. Palo Alto stock fell more than 7% on Friday, continuing a slide this week. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an agency within the United States Department of Homeland Security, this week added a… Copyright ©2026 Investor’s Business Daily, LLC. All rights reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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cyber-crime

The inevitable election-themed cyberattacks are whirring again, as the feds issue PSA about the ones to watch out for

The FBI is once again warning US citizens to be on the lookout for the scams that are so often rife around election season.With November’s midterms fast approaching, the FBI said scammers are known to use the names, imagery, and slogans of high-profile candidates for a range of frauds.These are often related to making donations and selling merchandise, but can also be geared toward stealing personal data for use in follow-on scams.
And of course, more recently, fraudsters’ efforts can be all the more convincing given the rise in AI use and deepfake technology, which can also be used to more accurately imitate the likenesses of candidates and other officials.
Campaign investment pool schemes are among the four big frauds the FBI wants the public to watch out for over the next few weeks.These involve scammers convincing their marks to pay into a campaign pool, which ostensibly pays out to all of those who donated after the candidate wins.More commonly, these types of pooled investment scams are based on collective investments into stocks and other appreciating assets. The FBI did not provide details about these campaign pools’ investment incentives or how victims are supposedly able to increase their stake by donating to the cause, but did say that no genuine campaign donations appreciate over time.Another common donation-based scam to be wary of is the one that convinces victims to fund a fake political action committee (PAC), one that collects supporters’ cash and promises to hand it to their favored party or candidate. Instead of forwarding money to a specific political campaign, however, the scammers pocket it all for themselves.Fraudsters are also known for claiming to sell merchandise related to political campaigns – orders that ultimately go unfulfilled. These constitute non-delivery scams, which rank in the top five genres of internet cons, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center’s (IC3) most recent annual report.
The same report put phishing at the number one spot in that same list, and the classic cyberattack features on the FBI’s list of midterm-related scams, too.Creating a sense of urgency, scammers will text victims claiming they have not yet registered to vote, and asking them to follow a link to a webpage where they can enter their details and complete the process, which of course leads to identity theft.While the FBI doesn’t include this detail in its advisory, Texans should be especially wary of these communication attempts given the recent computer issues that led to a massive backlog in registration applications.As of September 22, 226, around 600,000 applications were allegedly in limbo after a website flaw failed to record voters’ intentions to vote, and therefore did not receive registration forms from the Texas Secretary of State (SOS), according to a lawsuit [PDF] filed by voter registration organizations last week.However, spokesperson for the SOS’ office Alicia Pierce told USA Today that the backlog was only in the tens of thousands and that as of this week it was all-clear.Scammers may nevertheless continue to capitalize on the public awareness of the backlog when devising the lures for their phishing campaigns.The feds advised the public to be wary of these kinds of communications, and verify all political organizations, such as PACs, via the government’s election commission website. Although some scam PACs can appear on the website as registered, you can usually discern the suspicious ones when they report high expenses for matters such as consulting, fundraising, and other admin costs.
The FBI’s advisory follows separate action taken by X, which on Wednesday evening warned that influence campaigns originating from Iran, Russia, and China were targeting US voters, amplifying content across the political spectrum.The social media platform responded by nuking more than 13,000 accounts linked to the foreign interference attempts. ®


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Healthcare
,
Incident & Breach Response
,
Industry Specific

Breach Could Affect Every iRhythm User

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee (HealthInfoSec) •
October 16, 2026    

Image: Shutterstock/ISMG

A data breach by wearable cardiac monitor maker iRhythm Technologies is large enough to potentially encompass every user of the San Francisco company’s technology.See Also: Transform Financial Services with Smarter, Unified Cybersecurity
The portable heartbeat detector manufacturer divulged the breach’s topline to the Oregon attorney general in an Oct. 6 filing that became public Thursday (see: Heart Monitor Firm Notifying At Least 370,000 Patients of Hack).
A handful of media outlets, including BeInsure, have reported that the iRhythm incident affected millions, but the Oregon filing is the first official confirmation of the breach’s wide-ranging scope. The company has been reluctant to make known the full extent of its breach, telling ISMG in a Tuesday email that “the number of affected individuals is reflected in our required regulatory filings.”
The company on its website describes itself as a “world leader in the management of cardiac arrhythmia information,” with more than 8 million patients in the U.S. and Europe, and “over 1.5 billion hours of heartbeat data analyzed.” iRhythm’s products include its Zio electrocardiogram monitoring devices that patients wear at home.
iRhythm in a June 10 filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said it received demands from a threat actor for an undisclosed payment in exchange for not publicly releasing the stolen data, including proprietary data, patient protected health information and other personal information.
The company did not disclose whether it paid an extortion demand (see: Heart Monitoring Firm Tells SEC Hackers Stole Sensitive Data).


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Ransomware actors have been threatening their victims with physical violence, according to new survey data. Many are reporting actual physical attacks being carried out in service of ransomware extortions, though hard data substantiating these claims is missing.A combined two out of every five organizations that participated in Semperis’s newly released
2026 Ransomware Risk Report indicated they had faced intimidation and threats associated with their ransomware attacks, and often severe ones. Even more remarkably, more than half of respondents claimed that attackers “carried through on threats” they made.Semperis’s study relied on self-reporting, and it couldn’t corroborate these alarming figures, nor could Dark Reading. If true, the data suggests that ransomware is escaping the digital realm and becoming a genuine risk to victims’ safety. Unless and until proven cases of violent attacks surface, however, the data must be met with caution.Related:AI Scramble Drives Cybersecurity M&A BoomOrgs Say Employees Are Being AssaultedIt was last year when the realization first hit: Semperis started asking survey participants about physical threats to their organizations in its 2025 annual report, and a full 40% of participants said yes, they had received such threats from their hackers.This year’s data casts some confusion around the matter, as only 17% of 2026 respondents told surveyors that they’d been subject to physical threats. A further 23% reported psychological intimidation.Among personal threats, threatening texts, letters, or packages (57% of those who reported being threatened in the first place) were most commonly experienced. Attackers also went much further, though, by threatening employees’ family and friends (37%), physical intrusion into an organization’s facilities (19%), abduction (17%), bodily harm (13%), and stalking (6%).Worst of all, perhaps, is that 53% of survey respondents reported that their attackers actually carried out their threats.Interestingly, these figures varied significantly between countries and industry verticals. In the UK, Semperis found that around 34% of ransomware groups’ threats were carried out, and that victims might expect to be stalked 18% of the time. Hackers operating in Italy are exceptionally violent, apparently, as 32% of victims there were threatened with abduction and 22% with bodily harm, with 74% claiming that their threats were carried out.Attackers have been finding other ways to make ransomware personal issues for their victims, too. According to Semperis, victims or their families were doxxed, swatted, or subjected to some other sort of public shaming in more than half of all cases.Related:Device Code Phishing Up 1,500% in 2026; Vishing DoublesAre Threat Actors Actually Physically Harming People?Asked whether ransomware victims are actually being physically harmed, Jeff Wichman, Semperis’s director of incident response, states, “Yes. In some way, shape, or form, it does happen.”In reporting this story, however, Dark Reading failed to find even a single documented case of violence perpetrated in service of a ransomware attack. Asked for a case study, Semperis pointed to a Europol press release regarding so-called “violence-as-a-service,” but Europol did not connect violence-as-a-service with ransomware. However, there is hard evidence that violence in cyberattacks exists in related ways.First, physical violence is rife and increasing around cryptocurrency thefts. Back in February, Web3 security company CertiK Skynet published its annual report on so-called “wrench attacks.” As the name implies, “wrench attack” is the cryptocurrency world’s term to describe when attackers physically assault their targets in order to steal their cryptocurrency wallet private keys. CertiK Skynet documented 72 cases in 2025, which represented a 75% rise over 2024. Chainalysis found a similar “surge” of wrench attacks in 2025. Halfway through 2026, it found that violent attackers had successfully won $30 million worth of crypto.Related:Stronger AI Safety Requires Peeking Inside the ‘Black Box’What’s true of cryptocurrency is not necessarily true of enterprise cyberattacks, of course. But cyber extortion groups do appear to dabble in physical intrusion. In spring 2026, the FBI and Mandiant researchers each documented the “Silent Ransom Group” posing as IT technicians to enter corporate offices and extract data from endpoints using USBs.Lastly, it does seem the case that threats of violence are rising across online attacks generally (if not ransomware specifically). In its Internet Crime Report 2025, the FBI reported having received 1,360 complaints involving threats of violence, in cases that did not involve extortion. In 2025, it received 4,826 — a 250% rise year-over-year.Why Hackers Turn to Physical ThreatsSemperis has had firsthand experience with ransomware groups’ threats. A few years ago, while representing a US government organization in a ransom negotiation, one of its own employees received a package on his doorstep with a note “alluding to physical violence if he didn’t back off,” the BBC reported.Ironically, a rise in physical threats could be interpreted as a byproduct of improved organizational cybersecurity. “As attackers lose leverage with [extortion] — companies now are in the position of ‘we’ve got this and this covering us’ — now it’s more about forcing that demand. ‘You need to talk to us. We are serious,'” Wichman says.”It will keep evolving just like anything else,” he continues. “I look at it kind of like the days of the mafia. Originally, it was just about extorting money from businesses. Then it became: You didn’t pay us, now we’re going to get violent. Same old, same old.”

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