A major cybersecurity incident has exposed sensitive personal and health records of tens of thousands of Americans.

In a notice, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) says 103,000 individuals across the United States with accounts on Medicare.gov are impacted by a data breach.

CMS says it discovered that user data had been compromised after receiving multiple complaints through its call center. According to the federal agency, hackers may have used information from external sources to collect data such as names, dates of birth, Medicare Beneficiary Identifiers, coverage start dates and ZIP codes to fraudulently create Medicare.gov accounts.

Once inside, the thieves gained access to more sensitive data, including provider details, mailing addresses, dates of service, diagnosis codes, services received and plan premiums.

“On May 2, 2025, representatives at our 1-800-MEDICARE call center flagged complaints from people with Medicare who had received a letter through the mail about the creation of a Medicare.gov account. However, these callers hadn’t created the accounts or asked anyone else to do it for them.

Noticing the similarities in the reports, we investigated further and discovered more cases of accounts created between 2023 and 2025 that matched this pattern. We quickly deactivated those accounts, while also launching a larger effort to find the bad actors who created them.”

The CMS is a federal agency under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tasked with overseeing the country’s healthcare programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Health Insurance Marketplace.

The CMS is encouraging affected individuals to get a free credit report from each of the three major nationwide credit reporting companies. The agency also says that it hasn’t received any reports of identity fraud or improper use of personal information as a result of the incident.

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Cloudflare says it mitigated a record-breaking distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in May 2025 that peaked at 7.3 Tbps, targeting a hosting provider.

DDoS attacks flood targets with massive amounts of traffic with the sole aim to overwhelm servers and create service slowdowns, disruptions, or outages.

This new attack, which is 12% larger than the previous record, delivered a massive data volume of 37.4 TB in just 45 seconds. This is the equivalent of about 7,500 hours of HD streaming or 12,500,000 jpeg photos.

Cloudflare, a web infrastructure and cybersecurity giant specializing in DDoS mitigation, offers a network-layer protection service called ‘Magic Transit,’ which was used by the targeted customer.

The attack came from 122,145 source IP addresses spread across 161 countries, with the majority based in Brazil, Vietnam, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, and Ukraine.

The “garbage” data packages were delivered across multiple destination ports on the victim’s system, averaging 21,925 ports per second and peaking at 34,517 ports/second.

This tactic of scattering traffic helps overwhelm firewall or intrusion detection systems, but Cloudflare claims to have ultimately been able to mitigate the attack without human intervention.

Cloudflare’s anycast network dispersed attack traffic to 477 data centers in 293 locations, leveraging key technologies such as real-time fingerprinting and intra-data center gossiping for real-time intelligence sharing and automated rule compilation.

Though nearly the entire attack volume came from UDP floods, accounting for 99.996% of the total traffic, there were multiple other vectors involved, including:

• QOTD reflection
• Echo reflection
• NTP amplification
• Mirai botnet UDP flood
• Portmap flood
• RIPv1 amplification

Each vector exploited legacy or poorly configured services. While this was only a tiny percentage of the attack, it served as part of the attackers’ evasion and effectiveness strategy and could also help probe for weaknesses and misconfigurations.

Cloudflare says valuable IoCs from this attack were timely included in its DDoS Botnet Threat Feed, a free service that helps organizations block malicious IP addresses preemptively.

Over 600 organizations have subscribed to this feed, and the internet giant calls any others at risk of massive DDoS attacks to do the same and block the attacks before they reach their infrastructure.