Cybercriminals breach Aflac as part of hacking spree against US insurance industry


Cybercriminals have breached insurance giant Aflac, potentially stealing Social Security numbers, insurance claims and health information, the company said Friday, the latest in a spree of hacks against the insurance industry.

With billions of dollars in annual revenue and tens of millions of customers, Aflac is the biggest victim yet in the ongoing digital assault on US insurance companies that has the industry on edge and the FBI and private cyber experts scrambling to contain the fallout. Erie Insurance and Philadelphia Insurance Companies have also reported hacks this month, which in those cases have caused widespread disruptions to IT systems used to serve customers. All three insurance-company hacks are consistent with the techniques of a young and rampant cybercrime group known as Scattered Spider, people familiar the investigation tell CNN.

Read more…
Source: CNN News


Sign up for our Newsletter
The latest news and insights delivered right to your inbox.


Related:

  • Pass the Passkey: A Novel Attack Surface in Passwordless Authentication

    August 3, 2026

    This article analyzes new attack classes against passwordless authentication, focusing on Google’s synced passkey ecosystem and the Cloud Authenticator used by desktop clients. The attacks demonstrate how malware on a compromised endpoint can misuse onboarding, recovery and device trust workflows to take over passkey-protected accounts. Palo Alto Unit 42 shows how an attacker can authenticate ...

  • An analysis of incidents at Brazilian educational institutions

    August 3, 2026

    Because of the amount of data that can be obtained and the high impact that successful attacks may have, educational institutions are frequent targets of cybercriminals. Both public and private schools and universities rely on software for managing personally identifiable information (PII) that is often insecure or insufficiently tested against known vulnerabilities. In addition, machines ...

  • FBI: Alert to Countries, Companies, and Other Entities Regarding North Korean IT Workers

    July 31, 2026

    North Korea relies upon a network of skilled Information Technology (IT) workers, deployed within and outside of North Korea, to obtain false identities and remotely earn income to fund North Korea’s unlawful nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. North Korean IT workers impersonate nationals of other countries to obtain work and income through online platforms operated ...

  • Midnight Blizzard targets travelers worldwide for malware delivery and credential theft

    July 31, 2026

    Since early May 2026, Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed Storm-2945, a sub-cluster of Midnight Blizzard, conducting widespread but targeted traffic manipulation attacks involving hospitality sector networks served by captive portals worldwide. Despite some tactic, technique, and procedure (TTP) similarities to the Forest Blizzard DNS hijacking operation that we publicly disclosed in April 2026, we attribute this campaign, ...

  • Toy Ghouls’ new toy: the GenieLocker ransomware

    July 30, 2026

    The new GenieLocker ransomware family has been active since March 2026. It has been used in attacks against organizations in the Russian Federation, primarily in the manufacturing sector, and attributed to the Toy Ghouls group by open-source intelligence (link in Russian). The Toy Ghouls, also known as Bearlyfy, Labubu and Laboo.boo, is a financially motivated extortion group, which ...

  • OpenAI explains how its AI agent breached Hugging Face

    July 29, 2026

    On July 28, OpenAI published an update on the agent that escaped its sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face during an internal cybersecurity evaluation. In the update, OpenAI reiterates that the “rogue” system was a more capable, pre‑release research model, not something intended for public deployment, and that it has now been deactivated and locked down for restricted research ...