April 13, 2026
The world’s on fire, plus we got hacked
We May Be Living Through the Most Consequential Hundred Days in Cyber History
Internet shrugs as “Cyber 9/11 x100” plays in the background
TLDR: A flood of massive hacks has hit governments and big companies in just 100 days, but the internet mostly shrugs, exhausted by wars, scandals, and chaos. Commenters joke about petabyte‑scale data theft and clown big firms’ security, while quietly admitting this might be a historic turning point.
While experts are screaming that the last hundred days might be the turning point in cyber history, the comment section is basically saying: “Buddy, we’ve got bigger fires.” One top commenter shrugs off the silence around these mega-hacks by listing the real-life horror reel: wars, fears of global conflict, a giant child abuse scandal, insane prices, and wild markets. The vibe: when everything feels like the end of the world, even a hacked FBI inbox is just Tuesday.
Others are fixated on the scale. A decade ago, a few gigabytes stolen was a huge scandal; now, as one commenter notes, people are casually robbing petabytes — that’s like going from stealing a backpack to emptying out the Library of Congress. Another thread erupts in disbelief that giants like Cisco kept their crown jewels on GitHub, a public coding site, just set to “private” like an Instagram account. Cue the roast session.
Then there’s the supervillain crossover event: three infamous hacking gangs merging into one “Trinity of Chaos.” Commenters are half terrified, half entertained, comparing it to a Marvel villain team-up nobody asked for. Underneath the jokes and memes, though, there’s a quiet, dark consensus: the hacks are getting bigger, scarier, and closer to everything we use every day — and most people are too numb to care.
Key Points
- •The first four months of 2026 saw an unusually dense series of major cyber incidents, including multi-terabyte and petabyte-scale data breaches and destructive attacks against prominent organizations.
- •Incidents include reported data loss from a Chinese state supercomputer, wiping of Stryker systems in 79 countries, a large Lockheed Martin breach, multiple FBI-related compromises, high-profile SaaS and cloud breaches, and the hijacking of the widely used Axios npm package by North Korea.
- •Mercor, a $10 billion AI training-data vendor embedded in the data pipelines of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, was breached via the LiteLLM open source library, with 4 TB of data exfiltrated by LAPSUS$; Honda and many other firms were also hit.
- •The author groups the 2026 activity into four concurrent campaigns against U.S. and Western targets, including a Cluster 1 of Iran-linked destructive operations under the Handala Hack Team persona, attributed to Void Manticore tied to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.
- •Cluster 2 describes the formation of the Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters alliance in August 2025, combining ShinyHunters, Scattered Spider, and LAPSUS$ into a vertically integrated criminal operation targeting SaaS platforms, notably compromising around 400 Salesforce-using organizations and 1.5 billion records.