Apollo confirms data breach amid a wave of attacks on financial giants

Apollo Global Management, one of the world's largest private equity funds (with roughly $938 billion under management), has confirmed a data breach. The attackers stole a significant volume of personal information from the company's cloud systems.

The incident came to light through a notification filed with the California Attorney General. According to Apollo's chief human resources officer, Matthew Breitfelder, the hackers gained access to the company's cloud environment between July 6 and July 10, using a social engineering technique. Names, dates of birth, contact details (including home addresses) and Social Security numbers were stolen.

The letter does not specify whose data was compromised — that of Apollo's own employees (around 5,000 as of February 2026) or of people at companies the fund owns. An Apollo spokesperson did not respond to TechCrunch's questions, including whether the company paid a ransom.

Part of a broader campaign

The confirmed breach came weeks after Google security researchers warned of an extortion campaign targeting private equity funds and financial giants. According to Reuters, the attackers' targets, besides Apollo, included Blackstone, Bridgewater, Bain Capital and others, though at the time it was unclear whether the attackers had managed to break in.

As Google describes it, the hackers operate under various names — Falcon, Helix, Pink, Redact — and rely mainly on social engineering. They call employees, posing as support or IT help, and persuade them to enter passwords and multi-factor authentication codes on fake login pages. Having gained access to the corporate network this way, the attackers steal data and then demand a ransom under the threat of publishing the stolen material on their own site. Google estimates that individual attacks brought the extortionists as much as $750,000.

A curious detail: until 2025, TechCrunch itself was a division of Yahoo — the advertising-technology company owned by Apollo.

Source: TechCrunch