Information Technology · Tuesday, 1 September 2026

01 Briefing what happened

Boston Scientific was hacked a week ago. Heart devices fitted since cannot send their readings to doctors.

Information Technology 1 min 71 sources

The pacemaker maker's own computers were broken into on 25 August, and the service that reads implanted heart devices from a distance is still off. In the same week a criminal group took data from McKesson, one of the biggest US medical distributors, and asked for $55.2m.

25 August

the day intruders got into Boston Scientific's own computers

a week later the company still has no date for full repair [1][3]

48 million

patients Boston Scientific says it treats each year

it makes implanted pacemakers, defibrillators and heart monitors [2]

$55.2m

asked of McKesson by the group that says it took its patient data

the group claims 284 million records; the company has published no figure [1]

12.9m of 24.8m

of that group's last claimed haul that turned out to be real people

the rest was the victim company's own machine-made test data [5]

The lead story — what happened

A cyberattack on Boston Scientific, which makes pacemakers and defibrillators, began on 25 August and is still going on. [1][3]
Pacemakers and other heart devices implanted since that date cannot send readings to doctors, because the home monitoring units cannot be switched on. [1]
The devices still work and still record. A patient has to bring the reading in and have it read on a clinic app instead. [1]
The attack also stopped the company making, shipping and taking orders. Boston Scientific says it treats about 48 million patients a year. [1][2]
There is no date for full repair. The company hired the security firm CrowdStrike and says only its own on-site computers were hit, not its cloud services. [1][2]
Its shares fell more than 4% on the day it told US regulators about the attack. No group had claimed responsibility, and the company has declined to say whether it was ransomware. [1][3]
In the same week McKesson, one of the biggest US distributors of medicines and medical supplies, confirmed intruders took data from its cloud accounts. [4]
The group ShinyHunters says it took 284 million patient records and asked for $55.2m not to publish them. McKesson has given no number of its own. [1][4]
It got in by telephoning several McKesson employees and talking them into granting access to the company's Snowflake and Salesforce accounts. [1][4]
The stolen data is said to include names, addresses, Social Security numbers, diagnoses, medications and where in the body a cancer is. [1][4]
The same group hit the pacemaker maker Medtronic in April and the cancer-test firm Exact Sciences in July. [1]
Criminals' counts are often wrong. When that group leaked Carhartt's data, a checker cut the claim from 24.8 million people to 12,933,413. [5]
Much of the difference was the retailer's own machine-made test data in the same store, with customers in Benin and birthdays in the early 1900s. [5]

Who is involved

Boston Scientific

a US maker of implanted heart devices such as pacemakers and defibrillators; its own computers were broken into on 25 August
McKesson

one of the biggest US distributors of medicines and medical supplies to hospitals; it confirmed data was taken from its cloud accounts
ShinyHunters

a criminal group that steals company data and asks for money not to publish it; it claims the McKesson break-in
CrowdStrike

a security company; Boston Scientific hired it to run the investigation and rebuild the systems
Troy Hunt

he runs Have I Been Pwned, a free service that tells people whether their data was stolen; he counted the real victims in the group's last leak

What is pushing on this

Attacks on medical suppliers High↑

Boston Scientific, McKesson, Medtronic, Stryker and Abbott all hit this year [1][4]

Pressure to restart shipping Building↑

hospitals cannot order; only partial shipping was promised for this week [1]

Trust in what the criminals claim Easing↓

a checker cut the same group's last count roughly in half [5]

How it unfolded

Tue 25 Aug intruders get into Boston Scientific's on-site computers [1][3]
Wed 26 Aug the company tells US regulators of a global disruption; its shares fall more than 4% [3]
Fri 28 Aug ShinyHunters tells reporters it broke into McKesson's cloud accounts [1]
Sat 29 Aug McKesson confirms data was taken from two of its business units [1]
Mon 31 Aug Boston Scientific says heart devices fitted since the attack cannot report to doctors remotely [1]

Where this points

Watch whether Boston Scientific gives a restoration date this week. Until it does, every heart device it fits adds one more patient whose readings have to be carried into a clinic by hand. [1]

The rest of the day

61 more stories on this beat.

Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.

02
Amazon sued over its own advertising auction

The US Federal Trade Commission and 22 states sued Amazon on Monday, saying it secretly raised what millions of brands and sellers paid for the Sponsored Product adverts in its search results. Amazon said the claim misunderstands how advertisers work and cites no evidence that shoppers paid more. [6]

Why it matters — The company selling the goods also runs the auction for the space above them.
03
Outlook and ChatGPT Work fail on the same afternoon

Microsoft's Exchange Online, the system behind Outlook email, broke for hours on Monday; Microsoft blamed a component that checks who you are. OpenAI's ChatGPT Work had about three hours of errors the same afternoon, and no link between the two was reported. [7][8]

Why it matters — Two office tools that most large employers now depend on failed together, on a Monday.
04
GitHub's build service falls over again

GitHub Actions, which runs software builds and tests for millions of projects, degraded for about three hours on 26 August after switching to a backup database did not fix the problem. GitHub logged 26 separate incidents in April alone. [9]

Why it matters — The tools that ship everybody else's software are infrastructure now, and they break like it.
05
Chinese court freezes Nexperia's stakes

A court in Dongguan froze the Dutch chipmaker Nexperia's holdings in four of its Chinese subsidiaries under an asset-preservation order, its Chinese owner Wingtech said on Monday. Reuters put the value at about $300m. [10]

Why it matters — The fight over who controls Nexperia has moved from export rules into courts.
06
Taiwanese prosecutors raid an Nvidia supplier

Investigators raided Unimicron, one of the world's largest makers of the boards chips sit on, over claims it shipped China-made boards back to Taiwan and relabelled them as Taiwanese. Fourteen employees were questioned as suspects, and the head of its board business was bailed for about $473,000. [11]

Why it matters — US customs adds a 40% tariff to goods it decides were routed through a third country, and that penalty falls on the American buyer.
07
China's biggest memory maker sues the US defence department

CXMT, which makes DRAM, the working memory in phones and servers, filed suit to overturn its listing as a company tied to China's military. It says it spent over a year handing over information, and that a notice removing it was published in February and withdrawn the same day. [12]

Why it matters — The blacklists that shape the chip trade are being tested in court rather than negotiated.
08
The same firm claims the first LPDDR6 chips

CXMT said in a social-media post that it has started mass-producing LPDDR6, the next phone memory standard, for a Xiaomi handset. On earlier generations Chinese memory lagged Samsung, SK hynix and Micron by years. [13]

Why it matters — It is a company claim, not a measured result, but the gap it says it closed is the one export controls were meant to hold open.
09
Trump tells data-centre protesters they want to be poor

The US president posted on Monday that the only reason communities should not want data centres is if they want to end up backwards and poor, and told them to let data reign. [14]

Why it matters — Where the computers go has become an argument in the US midterm elections.
10
Three in four Americans oppose a local data centre

A Heatmap Pro and Embold Research poll found 83% of Democrats, 80% of independents and two-thirds of Republicans against a data centre in their own area. Net approval has swung 62 percentage points in a year, and more than half backed a national pause. [15]

Why it matters — Opposition that holds across every party and region is the kind politicians act on.
11
The reason is bills and noise, not a dislike of AI

Reviewing several polls, the researcher Andy Masley found the pushback tracks local harms - electricity costs and noise - rather than views about AI, big tech or China. The cost of grid upgrades has typically been spread across all users. [16]

Why it matters — A complaint about a bill can be settled with money; a complaint about AI could not.
12
US regulator moves to cut the public comment step

The US Environmental Protection Agency proposes scrapping the federal requirement that states publicise and take comments on air-pollution permits for data centres and the power plants that feed them. Nearly 200 advocacy groups and more than a dozen states object. [17]

Why it matters — That notice is how most residents first learn a data centre is coming.
13
62 unpermitted gas turbines beside two schools

The DataOne site in Vineland, New Jersey, is part of a $19.4bn arrangement to supply Microsoft. Campaigners say it has run 62 gas turbines without permits and built an unpermitted 1.5-million-gallon liquefied gas tank. They also report night noise breaches within half a mile. [18]

Why it matters — Residents say they only learned the site was a data centre after the deal was announced.
14
Two English sites would out-emit ExxonMobil's UK arm

Analysis by the group Foxglove says the planned Wapseys Wood and Quest Park data centres would draw 1.3GW and emit more than 4.5m tonnes of carbon a year. ExxonMobil's UK emissions were 3.9m tonnes in 2023. [19]

Why it matters — Britain's climate targets are set in law, and nobody has said which other emissions come down instead.
15
Spain writes rules while the projects queue

A draft Spanish decree would require data-centre operators to be established in the European Union, and to keep data and metadata inside it. At least 80% of every hour's electricity would have to be renewable. Each new megawatt used must be matched by a new megawatt built within 18 months. [20]

Why it matters — Spain has more offers than it can take, which is the opposite of most countries' position.
16
A US firm buys Saudi computing instead

Together AI, valued at $8.3bn in July, will take 250 megawatts of power and 120,000 chips from the Saudi company Humain. [21]

Why it matters — The scarce thing is no longer power or chips but local consent, and consent is easier to get abroad.
17
Southeast Asia plans four times what it runs

The region has 306 data centres running and 173 more in the pipeline. The research firm Arizton expects investment to rise from $15.72bn in 2025 to $35.08bn by 2031, with Malaysia leading on more than 6GW planned, most of it in Johor. [22]

Why it matters — Singapore stopped expanding outward and its neighbours took the work.
18
Australia cannot agree who supplies the power

Australia's prime minister, Anthony Albanese, wanted new data centres to bring their own 100% renewable electricity. Queensland and the Northern Territory want to use their state-owned gas and coal stations, so the national agreement was worded loosely enough for everyone to claim a win. [23]

Why it matters — Whether bring-your-own-power means clean power decides if the build helps or strains the grid.
19
SpaceX starts casting its own turbine blades

Elon Musk said SpaceX will cast turbine blades and vanes in-house, to speed up the portable gas generators xAI uses instead of waiting for a grid connection. He says it could cut deliveries by 18 months, against a queue running towards 2030. [24]

Why it matters — When the queue for the grid is the constraint, firms start manufacturing their way around it.
20
A billion-dollar value for turning data centres down

Emerald AI, whose software makes data centres cut their power draw when the grid is short, was valued at $1.05bn after a Series A round led by Energize Capital and DCVC, taking its total raised past $220m. [25]

Why it matters — It is a bet that flexibility, not more generation, is what gets a project connected.
21
An AI assistant reaches $2.5bn in months

Instinct, an assistant you connect to your apps and then text or call, raised $250m in a Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. That takes total funding to $350m at a $2.5bn valuation. [26]

Why it matters — The money is moving from the models to the thing that runs errands with them.
22
Robot model start-up valued at $3bn

Generalist, founded by two former Google DeepMind researchers and a former Boston Dynamics engineer, added nearly $200m to a $400m Series B, bringing the round to $600m. [27]

Why it matters — It is training one model to drive many different robots rather than one robot well.
23
A chip renter borrows another billion

Lambda took $1bn in private debt to buy chips, days after closing a $926m loan for Nvidia GB300 processors it is contracted to supply back to Nvidia. Banks and tech firms have raised more than $400bn of AI-related debt worldwide this year, on Bloomberg's count. [28]

Why it matters — The build-out has shifted from shares to borrowing, and borrowing has a repayment date.
24
Identity checker Socure valued at $5.2bn

Socure, which verifies that people online are who they say, took a growth investment led by Summit Partners and bought Fravity, a platform for running agent-driven operations. [29]

Why it matters — As fraud gets automated, so does the checking.
25
Music labels buy into Stable Diffusion's maker

Stability AI raised $76m, taking its total to $232m, with money from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, the games company Electronic Arts, and AMD Ventures. [30]

Why it matters — The round reads less like a venture raise than a list of the partners Stability needs content licences from.
26
Seoul start-up raised at $870m

Wrtn secured about 100 billion won in a Series C, with new backers Coreline Ventures and Eugene Asset Management joining Goodwater Capital, Woori Venture Partners and the Korea Development Bank. [31]

Why it matters — South Korea's AI money is coming partly from state-linked institutions, not only venture funds.
27
Mexico's Primero raises $12m to wire up old systems

Its product connects the fragmented legacy software big Latin American companies still run on, and captures processes that currently live in employees' heads. Chief executive Jose Murillo said buyers can now measure a return: "Before, selling software was more of a leap of faith." [32]

Why it matters — The value is in the undocumented knowledge, not in the model.
28
Bengaluru's Runable raises $21m

The 15-person start-up, valued at $65m after the round, is aiming at what comes after building a website: finding customers for small businesses. Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners co-led. [33]

Why it matters — It is taking on Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor and Replit with fifteen people.
29
Video search start-up valued at $250m

Clipto, three years old and split between San Francisco, Singapore and Hong Kong, raised $15m to make terabytes of video and recordings searchable. Adobe, Apple and Google are building the same thing into products people already own. [34]

Why it matters — Whether this is a product or a feature is the open question of the round.
30
Magna puts $35m more into Indian battery swapping

The car-parts maker raised its stake in Yuma Energy, a Bengaluru firm that swaps batteries for electric two- and three-wheelers. Yuma has completed more than 60 million swaps and has about 100,000 batteries out on its network. [35]

Why it matters — Swapping avoids charging time, which is the real constraint on small delivery vehicles.
31
India's IT firms merge to keep up

ITC Infotech will buy 22.1% of Happiest Minds for about $140m and then merge with it, aiming for $1bn of revenue by 2028; the deal takes three to eight months. Coforge bought Encora for $2.3bn last year, and Persistent Systems plans to buy Germany's Nagarro for $1.1bn. [36][37]

Why it matters — AI is lowering the barrier that kept mid-sized Indian firms out of the largest contracts, so they are buying scale.
32
Broadcom takes on securing Spring and RabbitMQ

The company said it will produce checked, signed builds of the open-source Java framework Spring and the message system RabbitMQ, both of which matter to its own Tanzu products. [38]

Why it matters — Free software that thousands of companies depend on now needs somebody paid to stand behind it.
33
LibreOffice advertises having no AI

The Document Foundation led the announcement of version 26.8 of the free office suite with "professional typography, deeper support for the world's writing systems, and no artificial intelligence". [39]

Why it matters — The absence of a feature is being used as the selling point.
34
VS Code adds a model to argue with the first

Version 1.135 of Microsoft's code editor adds Rubber Duck, a built-in critic that reviews the main agent's plans, code and tests using a different model. It can also pick up Copilot or Claude sessions started in other apps. [40]

Why it matters — The proposed fix for an agent's blind spots is another agent.
35
JetBrains lets an agent drive a running app

Compose Multiplatform 1.12.0 adds an experimental server using MCP, the standard that lets AI tools drive other software. A coding agent can now reload the app, take screenshots, click, type and read the logs. [41]

Why it matters — The agent stops guessing whether its own change worked and looks.
36
A local rival for running and training models

Unsloth Desktop, an open-source app from the brothers Daniel and Michael Han, runs models on your own machine and also trains them, with image generation and multi-step workflows, on Windows, macOS and Linux. [42]

Why it matters — Training, not just running, is now something you can do without a cloud bill.
37
OpenClaw 2.0 lands and gets a hostile review

The tool that runs AI agents added a rebuilt browser interface, shared cloud sessions, tighter walls around what an agent can touch, permissions by job role, and a record of what it did. The Register called it glitter on a slow-burning security fire, because most of the protection is still left for the user to switch on. [43][44]

Why it matters — The gap is not what the software can do but what it does if nobody configures it.
38
Cohere sells a parser on price, not accuracy

Parse 5, a 2.3-billion-parameter model that turns PDFs and slides into structured text, scores below GPT-5.5, Opus 4.8 and Gemini 3.5 Flash on Cohere's own published benchmark. It is priced at $1.50 per 1,000 pages. [45]

Why it matters — A vendor publishing a benchmark it loses is rare, and it moves the argument to cost per page.
39
Perplexity and Nvidia put the agent on the desk

Portable Computer keeps the model, the files and the work on the machine, charges no usage credits for local work, and asks permission before sending any step to a cloud model. [46]

Why it matters — Nvidia spent two years selling data centres and is now selling the machine that avoids one.
40
Nvidia shows the chip it bought from Groq

At the Hot Chips conference Nvidia presented the Groq 3 LPX rack, which came from its $20bn purchase of Groq in December 2025. It published a first outside benchmark: 3,431 output tokens a second on a reasoning task, against 870 for the next-fastest public service. [47]

Why it matters — It is an independently measured number, which most chip and model claims are not.
41
Intel puts an open chiplet link in a cheap chip

Wildcat Lake uses UCIe, the shared industry standard for wiring together the separate pieces of silicon inside one chip, to cut cost. Intel says the part could not have existed without it. [48]

Why it matters — The open standard turns up first at the budget end, where there is no money for a private one.
42
Apple refreshes the Macs it could not keep in stock

The Mac Mini and Mac Studio return with the M6, Apple's first 2-nanometre chip, and the M5 Ultra. The M6 Mac Mini costs $200 more than the model it replaces. [49]

Why it matters — Both machines were hard to buy for most of the year, and the price went up rather than down.
43
Apple's iPhone event set for 9 September

Apple confirmed the date of its annual launch in Cupertino, with a foldable iPhone rumoured alongside new watches and AirPods. [50]

Why it matters — A foldable would be Apple's first answer to a shape Samsung and Google have sold for years.
44
Samsung's cheaper flagship changes almost nothing

The Galaxy S26 FE keeps last year's 6.7-inch screen, 4,900mAh battery and triple rear camera. The processor is a year newer and the selfie camera is slightly wider. [51]

Why it matters — The upgrades are software features already shipped on this year's dearer Samsungs.
45
Cheap laptops are disappearing

Rising memory and storage prices have thinned the budget laptop market, and older cheap models are being discontinued faster than new ones arrive. [52]

Why it matters — The AI build-out's appetite for memory has reached the cheapest shelf in the shop.
46
FBI names the proxy network behind Chinese hacking

The US Justice Department took down two tools, QTRouter and QScan, which it says a contractor called Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology sold to state hackers, giving them access to networks of hacked internet-connected devices. [53]

Why it matters — The tools hid where attacks came from, so naming them matters more than seizing the domains.
47
More than 100 US water systems probed

CISA, the US cyber-defence agency, said attacks largely targeted programmable logic controllers - the small computers that open valves and run pumps - made by Rockwell, Schneider Electric and others, at water providers in Michigan, Minnesota and at least five other states. [54]

Why it matters — Those controllers were built to be reachable over a network, not to be defended on one.
48
Backdoors found in routers sold under many brands

Researchers at VulnCheck found three implants in firmware from Shenzhen Zhibotong, known as ZBT, whose routers are sold worldwide under many names. One starts at boot, disguises itself as a normal Linux process and runs commands from a fixed server with full control. [55]

Why it matters — Buyers usually cannot tell they own a ZBT router, so they cannot check.
49
Two arrested in Australia over a thousand break-ins

Police in Perth charged two men with more than a dozen hacking and money-laundering offences over TeamPCP. The FBI's cyber chief said the group broke into more than a thousand organisations by tampering with popular open-source projects. [56]

Why it matters — Poisoning a shared code package reaches every organisation that installs it.
50
A US firearms agency confirms a break-in

The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said a ransomware group - criminals who steal or lock up data and demand payment - reached a standalone system holding information about the targets of its investigations. It says the system was shut down when the breach was found. [57]

Why it matters — The people at risk are the subjects of investigations, not the agency's staff.
51
Nvidia sets up a political fund

Nvidia registered an employee political action committee with the US Federal Election Commission, taking voluntary contributions of up to $5,000 a year to fund politicians whose positions favour it. It told staff that decisions by the US Congress could have substantial consequences for AI. [58]

Why it matters — It is the standard step after lobbying, taken by the company most exposed to export rules.
52
Tencent releases a 770-billion-parameter open model

Hy4 preview uses a mixture-of-experts design - many specialist sub-models, of which only about 49 billion parameters' worth run on any one request - aimed at software engineering, research and financial analysis. [59]

Why it matters — It is free to download, which is the part American labs cannot answer on price.
53
Alibaba and IBM ship models to run yourself

Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash handles text and images, can hold 262,144 tokens of text at once, and cost less to train [60]. IBM's Granite 4.2 comes in 3-, 8- and 30-billion-parameter versions built to be self-hosted, with the two larger ones trained to use a terminal and search the web [61].

Why it matters — This week's releases are all aimed at hardware you own rather than an API you rent.
54
Nvidia tunes chips for Chinese models and warns about the rules

Nvidia published optimisations for DeepSeek's V4 Flash and Alibaba's Qwen 3.8, and in the same week told US regulators in a filing that restrictions on Chinese-developed AI could hurt its business. [62]

Why it matters — The chips are American, the popular free models increasingly are not, and Nvidia sells to whoever runs them.
55
Anthropic publishes rules for agents touching hardware

The Model Hardware Standard sets out how AI agents should and should not drive physical equipment. The company says it will work with selected partners before making it generally available. [63]

Why it matters — An agent that can order a lab robot is a different risk from one that can only write.
56
OpenAI is testing an agent that does not stop

Code for a "Persistent mode" appeared in the public repository for OpenAI's Codex command-line tool. The company confirmed it is testing the feature and said there are no immediate plans to launch it. [64]

Why it matters — An agent that keeps running between tasks changes what it can be trusted with.
57
Anthropic says automated researchers fixed alignment faults

Given 10 benchmarks for specific misbehaviours, automated systems that read the literature, propose a method and train for 30 minutes improved every one without hurting overall performance. [65]

Why it matters — It is a paper rather than a product, and the ten benchmarks were chosen in advance.
58
Sovereign cloud efforts are falling short

Rest of World reports that outside the United States and China, government attempts to reduce dependence on American cloud providers have changed little; the UK signed a five-year Microsoft deal in 2024. [66]

Why it matters — The 2024 CrowdStrike failure hit 8.5 million Windows machines and closed airports, which is what that dependence looks like when it breaks.
59
Europe's founders keep asking who controls the models

At the TechBBQ conference in Copenhagen, investors and founders returned repeatedly to what it would mean for Europe to own the models and the hardware under this wave of AI rather than rent them from the United States and China. [67]

Why it matters — Renting the model means somebody else decides where and whether it stays available.
60
South Korea's export run reaches 15 months

Exports rose 68.7% in August from a year earlier, a 15th straight monthly gain and ahead of forecasts; economists polled beforehand had expected 62.6%. The gains are anchored by the memory makers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. [68][69]

Why it matters — One country's export figure has become a readable gauge of how fast AI hardware is being built.
61
A search index built for machines

Keenable, founded by a former head of search at the Russian firm Yandex and a German AI scientist, came out of stealth with $26m led by Accel to index the web for AI agents rather than for people. [70]

Why it matters — Pages were shaped for a person's short attention, and an agent can read the whole thing.
62
Hugging Face sells a $399 robot duck

Microduck, from the Pollen Robotics team it bought in 2025, has a camera, a laser range-finder and two motion sensors. Its behaviours can be trained in simulation and loaded onto the robot, and the training stack is on GitHub. [71]

Why it matters — It is a cheap physical body for the free models, which open-source AI has mostly lacked.

02 Lesson why it matters

Most of what an attack breaks was never attacked

To be sure an intruder is out of one system, a company switches off the ones beside it - so most of the damage is done by the people defending.

The twist

The intruder opens one door. The defender closes every door, because not knowing how far somebody got has to be treated as if they got everywhere.

How it works

An intruder gets into one part of a company's computers
Nobody can tell how far they reached, because the same logins go everywhere
So the company shuts down whole systems, not just the one that was entered
Jobs nobody touched stop: shipping, ordering, reading heart devices from a distance
Turning them back on means proving the intruder is gone, which has no fixed date

Where you've seen this

Hospitals

one infected machine, and the whole records system goes back to paper

Banks

one payment processor under suspicion, and every card is declined at the till

Schools

one staff account taken, and every pupil's password is reset

Airports

a check-in system pulled offline, and boarding passes go back to handwriting

The catch

The alternative is worse. A company that keeps everything running while it investigates is betting the intruder has already left, and other people carry the cost of that bet being wrong.

And the whole of it

Everyone here is acting sensibly from where they sit. The security team cannot prove nobody is still inside, so it closes the building. The hospital cannot see into the manufacturer. The patient cannot see any of it and finds out by letter. Almost everything any of us relies on is arranged this way, and the arrangement only becomes visible on the day it stops.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

Nobody attacked a heart device. Someone got into a manufacturer's office computers, and the service that reads those devices from a distance was switched off along with the shipping and the invoices.

Why it works on us — Both companies describe this in the vocabulary of computing - disruption, degradation, affected functions - which is accurate, and which also keeps the patient out of the sentence.

Who gains

ShinyHunters — Its claimed figures are reported before anyone can check them, so an inflated count is free publicity whether or not the company pays. Its last count was cut roughly in half. [1][5]
CrowdStrike — Boston Scientific hired it to run both the investigation and the rebuild, work with no fixed end date. [1]
Saudi Arabia's Humain — American opposition to local data centres is pushing computing contracts abroad, and Together AI has just booked 250 megawatts and 120,000 chips there. [15][21]
India's mid-sized IT firms — AI is lowering the barrier to large contracts, and ITC Infotech is paying about $140m for a listed rival to reach $1bn of revenue faster. [36][37]
Nvidia — It sells the chips whichever country's free models win, and this week it published tuning for DeepSeek's and Alibaba's. [62]

Who pays

Patients fitted with a Boston Scientific heart device since 25 August — Their readings do not reach a doctor on their own. Somebody has to bring the device in and have it read on a clinic app. [1]
Hospitals waiting on Boston Scientific supplies — Manufacturing, shipping and ordering all stopped, and the company promised only partial shipping this week. [1]
Cancer patients on McKesson's oncology systems — The data said to be taken includes diagnoses, medications and where in the body a cancer is. [1][4]
Residents near the Vineland data centre in New Jersey — Campaigners say 62 gas turbines have run there without permits, near two schools. [18]
People buying a cheap laptop — Memory and storage price rises are thinning the budget range, and older cheap models are being discontinued. [52]

What nobody knows yet

Open questions from across today’s stories — ours included.

01

How many people's medical records McKesson actually lost.

The group that claims the break-in says 284 million records. McKesson has published no number and describes it only as a subset of customers in two business units. [1][4]
02

Who broke into Boston Scientific, and whether anything was taken.

No group has claimed it, and the company has repeatedly declined to say whether it was ransomware or what was stolen. [1][3]
03

When Boston Scientific's remote monitoring comes back.

A week after the intrusion the company says only that it is working on restoring access, and has given no date. [1]
04

How many people Monday's Outlook failure actually reached.

Two outlets reported two peaks from the same crowd-sourced tracker: more than 5,000 reports, and about 4,600. Neither figure is a count of affected users, and Microsoft published none. [7][8]
05

Whether Amazon's advertising practices raised what shoppers paid.

The regulator says the higher costs were largely passed on. Amazon says the complaint cites no evidence of consumer price increases. The case was filed on Monday and nothing has been tested. [6]
06

Whether CXMT is really making LPDDR6 in volume at quality.

The claim came in a company social-media post, and reaching mass production is not the same as shipping good chips at scale. [13]
07

What Unimicron's boards were labelled, and where they went.

Fourteen employees were questioned as suspects; five posted bail and nine were released without it. No charges have been announced, and the company says it expects no material impact. [11]
08

Whether the US public-comment requirement will actually go.

It is a proposal. Nearly 200 groups and more than a dozen states have objected, and no final decision has been published. [17]

04 Hope carry this

Troy Hunt went through the data the same criminal group leaked from the clothing firm Carhartt and found that nearly half of the 24.8 million people in it did not exist. The 12,933,413 who did are now in Have I Been Pwned, a free service anyone can search to see whether their own details were taken.