If we look back at the year of 2026 so far, it might be easy to see cybersecurity falling by the wayside, as much of the world’s attention remains on wars raging, the climate worsening, and we’re seemingly just one dodgy sneeze away from the next global pandemic.
But cybersecurity remains a powerful barometer of what’s happening on the world stage, with botnets powering digital efforts to undermine the West and governments weaponizing citizens’ data and civilian infrastructure against entire populations of people. All the while, financially motivated hackers seek massive ransom payouts, as they spark disruption and occasional destruction across governments and private industries.
As we’re halfway through this already horrendous year of digital attacks and hybrid warfare, we look at some of the worst hacks and breaches so far, and how they might affect us going forward.
A year on, after operatives with the Elon Musk-led band of government destroyers known as the Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE) swept through and dismantled federal agencies from the inside out, we’re still learning about the data lapses that happened under their watch.
After DOGE entered the Social Security Administration, it remains unclear as to what happened with some of the nation’s most sensitive data, as lawsuits battle on in federal court. The most alarming whistleblower’s claim is that DOGE uploaded a live copy of the Social Security database to an unsecured third-party server, leading to a scramble to understand what was stored in it. This database allegedly contained the Social Security numbers and associated personal information of most living Americans.
In court filings, the Social Security Administration doesn’t know for sure what was on the server, but said that the DOGE signed an agreement with an outside political advocacy group under the guise of finding evidence of voter fraud, something that President Trump continues to claim without any evidence. The fears are that the database could be misused to target Americans for spurious reasons.
Two of the top House Democrats investigating some of DOGE’s activities at the Social Security Administration said that the exposure of the government’s Social Security database “could very well be the largest data breach in our nation’s history.”
A rash of cyberattacks across Europe targeting civilian energy and water supplies, like power plants and water dams, has set a troubling trend of late. Several hacks attributed to (or at least in part blamed on) Russia have risked real-world harm to communities and populations.
Poland’s energy grid was targeted with computer-destroying malware at the tail end of last year, as well as a Swedish thermal plant, and a Norwegian dam that spilled swimming pools’ worth of water. Hackers targeted Poland again earlier this year, this time its water treatment plants, showing that Russia’s hybrid war antagonism continues to extend beyond the digital realm.
Now, thanks to the recent war between the U.S. and Israel against Iran, there are warnings that Iranian hackers are targeting critical infrastructure in the United States. This includes privately owned water utilities, which remain a soft target for hackers, often lacking basic cybersecurity protections.
Speaking of Iran, a cyberattack on a U.S. medical tech company, Stryker, in March saw Iranian hackers break in and remotely wipe tens of thousands of employee devices in one fell swoop, causing widespread disruption to the company’s operations for several days.
The breach was a marked shift in Iranian hacking tactics at a time of ongoing war in the Middle East, with Iran moving from its typical focus of espionage and hack-and-leak operations in aid of the country’s political gains, towards actively causing destructive hacks in apparent retaliation for the war. The U.S. government attributed the hacking group behind the breach to an arm of Iranian intelligence. The breach ended up having a material impact on Stryker’s first-quarter earnings after regaining control of its systems.
The ShinyHunters continued their hacking campaigns, targeting dozens of companies with simple but highly effective voice phishing techniques. The English-speaking hackers are adept at tricking companies into turning over access to their internal systems by pretending to be IT support, or conversely, an employee who forgot their password.
Few know better than the toll a hack from the ShinyHunters can have than education tech giant Instructure. The hackers breached the company’s flagship learning management system Canvas to steal private data and personal information belonging to over 30 million students and staff. When the company didn’t pay the hackers’ ransom, the hackers broke in — again — and defaced the school’s login screens for Canvas, used by students to access their exam and coursework material. This second hack happened during school finals, disrupting exams for students across the United States. Instructure eventually paid the ransom, despite efforts by the FBI to dissuade the company from paying.
Instructure wasn’t the only company targeted by the ShinyHunters hackers by far. The gang has been behind some of the largest breaches by the number of records stolen, including some 40 million records from internet provider Charter and at least 6 million customer records from cruiseliner Carnival, among other victims in higher education, finance, and government.
A series of ongoing, concurrent, and occasionally overlapping attacks on open source developers have resulted in massive hacks targeting big tech companies and their customers.
Some of the biggest names in security, including Aqua Security’s Trivy tool, Bitwarden, and Checkmarx, alongside other major open source projects, were compromised this year, allowing the hackers to steal passwords, credentials, and other sensitive tokens from the computers of anyone who installed a backdoored copy of the software, or their pre-installed software auto-updated to download the malware.
These attacks used the stolen credentials to spread further, and opened the door to downstream compromises of big companies that rely on the targeted software, including AI giant OpenAI and web hosting company Vercel. With a new hack almost every week, the open source world remains a vulnerable target in the broader tech ecosystem.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation was forced to declare a “major cyber incident” in April, prompting a legally required disclosure with Congress, after identifying that one of its surveillance systems was compromised. According to reports, the breach potentially exposed phone numbers of targets under surveillance by federal agents.
Chinese spies were accused of the breach of the unclassified network, which held sensitive information about the surveillance targets of wiretaps and other communication intercepts, such as pen register returns. By notifying lawmakers, the breach is likely to have met a bar of causing “demonstrable harm” to U.S. national security.
Toymaker giant Hasbro is the latest example of what happens when a large corporation is hit by a security incident and isn’t prepared for it. Weeks after discovering hackers in its systems in late March, the 103-year-old company remained largely offline, its website unavailable, and unable to serve its customers.
The company, which owns big name brands such as Transformers, Peppa Pig, and Dungeons & Dragons, has said little about the incident itself, what data was taken — if any, and whether it paid the hackers. But the disruption alone is likely to affect the company’s financials, which it was forced to delay, as the company scrambled to handle the incident.
Hasbro said as of mid-May that the hackers are no longer in its systems and that its recovery was underway. But the financial costs of the breach and the knock-on effect to its business are likely to be realized in the coming months, and are expected to be substantial.
Over the past few months alone, there has been an uptick in major data exposures involving people’s sensitive government-issued identity documents, including passport and driver’s license scans left exposed to the web. From a hotel check-in system and a money transfer app to a prison payphone provider and a U.K. visa service, these services exposed over two million people’s personal documents that can be easily misused. Many were caused by simple security lapses that were easily avoidable with basic cybersecurity practices.
These massive data spills come at a time when closed-community apps and websites are increasingly leaning on “know your customer” checks to force users to verify their identity before being allowed in, and governments are pushing age verification laws demanding similar identity checks from adults to access a vast swath of the internet.
The logic goes that the greater the spills, the less effective these identity checking systems are, as they can be easily misused with a stolen or leaked passport or driver’s license. The further rollout of these ID-collecting systems will inevitably lead to more data breaches and security lapses.
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Zack Whittaker is the security editor at TechCrunch. He also authors the weekly cybersecurity newsletter, this week in security.
He can be reached via encrypted message at zackwhittaker.1337 on Signal. You can also contact him by email, or to verify outreach, at zack.whittaker@techcrunch.com.
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