Apollo confirms breach in hacking wave hitting finance giants

Private equity giant Apollo Global Management has confirmed a data breach in which hackers stole personal information from the company’s cloud systems. Apollo’s human resources chief, Matthew Breitfelder, said in a letter filed with California’s attorney general that hackers used a social engineering attack to gain access to the company’s cloud environment between July 6 and July 10, taking names, birth dates, contact information — including home addresses — and Social Security numbers. The letter doesn’t specify whose personal information was stolen, such as Apollo employees or people at companies the firm owns. Apollo, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, manages $938 billion in assets and had around 5,000 employees as of February 2026, according to its public regulatory filings. Reached by TechCrunch, Apollo spokesperson Giovanna Falbo did not immediately comment or say whether the company paid the hackers a ransom.

The confirmed breach comes weeks after Google security researchers warned that hackers were targeting private equity firms and financial giants as part of a widespread extortion campaign. Reuters had reported that Apollo was among the targets, alongside Blackstone, Bridgewater, Bain Capital, and others, though it was unclear at the time whether any of them had actually been breached. According to Google, the hackers — who operate under names including Falcon, Helix, Pink, and Redact — rely largely on social engineering: calling employees while posing as IT helpdesk staff to trick them into entering passwords and multi-factor authentication codes on spoofed login pages. Once inside, they steal data and then extort companies for a ransom or threaten to publish it on a leak site; Google says some of the group’s attacks have netted ransoms of as much as $750,000.

Why it matters

The campaign shows that even firms with no consumer-facing products — the private capital that quietly owns large chunks of the global economy — are exposed to the same social-engineering tactics that have hit airlines and retailers, with employee logins, not software flaws, as the weak point.