Exact Sciences data breach
In July 2026, Exact Sciences (now owned by Abbott Laboratories) was the target of a ShinyHunters "pay or leak" extortion campaign. The group claimed to have obtained data from the company's cancer diagnostics business, which they later published publicly. The breach contained 10.9M unique email addresses belonging to customers, patients and healthcare providers, along with names, addresses, phone numbers and health records. Abbott subsequently published a public notice advising that "some of the impacted files contain personal information and/or personal health information" and that more specific information would follow once their review of the incident was complete. For context, Exact Sciences is the maker of the Cologuard at-home colorectal cancer screening test.
Sources
- Primary: https://www.abbott.com/en-us/corpnewsroom/diagnostics-testing/abbott-statement-on-cyber-incident-in-cancer-diagnostics-business
- Upstream record (Have I Been Pwned): https://haveibeenpwned.com/Breach/ExactSciences
- Breach data from Have I Been Pwned (haveibeenpwned.com), CC BY 4.0
Defenses for this class of incident
all categoriesA data breach sits in these classes of the AI-security landscape. The companies below work on that class of problem. This is a taxonomy, not a claim that any of them would have changed this incident.
Vendor data: AI Security Startups Map by Prompt Security (CC BY 4.0), synced daily. startups.prompt.security. Paid placements are labelled Sponsored; HeimWall, which runs this site, is labelled Operator. 452 companies in the directory.
Wrong or missing? Email founders@heimwall.ai. Corrections are logged here, in place. How corrections and takedowns work.