This week on the Lock and Code podcast…

You will die. Your data will not.

The afterlife of our information is a recent phenomenon, and some of the companies with the most to sort through are still just figuring it out.

As far back as 2007, Facebook was forced to reckon with mass grief when users asked the company to maintain the profile pages of the 32 victims killed by a school shooter at Virginia Tech that year. Those pages became de facto memorials for loved ones to fill with comments, and today, memorialization has become a full-fledged feature on both Facebook and Instagram. Platforms like YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn—launched with likely zero strategy for a user’s death—now have procedures for next-of-kin to request that a deceased person’s account be deactivated.

Now, think about all the other ways your data can linger after death.

Every year, people accumulate more and digital stuff—email addresses, social media profiles, contact lists, domain names, subscription services, online banking accounts, and the phones, laptops, and tablets that hold it all—and every year, as that digital stuff accumulates, it compounds into ever more problems for someone else to sort out. Here, a small industry of digital estate planners have cropped up, helping families retrieve and preserve anything valuable, no matter how digital, from Spotify playlists, to poignant social media posts that mattered, to the photos stored on a phone.

And where retrieval fails, artificial intelligence has offered an attempt at comfort. The chatbot service Replika launched in 2015 after its founder uploaded a dead friend’s text messages. HereAfter AI reportedly let users upload voice recordings to power a chatbot that sounded and spoke like the deceased. Film studios have pursued the same idea for entertainment, seeking to portray deceased actors in future films.

Surprisingly, almost none of this activity is governed by law, said Tamara Kneese, author of the 2023 book “Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond.”

“By and large, there is not a great legal mechanism for protecting the privacy rights of the dead,” said Kneese. “It may not be just that a grieving loved one decides to use a bunch of your data from all of your podcasts to create a chatbot to simulate interacting with you after you’re dead, but it may be that a company chooses, in some way, to use an aspect of your personality, of your demeanor, of your voice, of your likeness after your death without anyone really being aware.”

Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Kneese—Senior Research Scientist at Partnership on AI—about who owns a person’s data after they die, why every platform has invented its own private policy for the dead, and how the technology built to keep the dead close can vanish just as suddenly as they did.

Or worse yet, as Kneese warned for those relying heavily on certain technologies in grief:

“The company gets sold to someone else or disappears, goes bankrupt, and you no longer have that outlet or place for interaction when you’re mourning another time.”

Tune in today to listen to the full conversation.

Show notes and credits:

Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)

Further reading:

Fartein Hauan Nilsen, “Caring for the Algorithm: Care, Love, and the Relational Personhood of Chatbots,” Somatosphere, February 26, 2026

Fartein Hauan Nilsen, “Therapeutic ideology and AI personhood: an anthropological inquiry into AI companionship,” a chapter from “Handbook on Anthropology and Artificial Intelligence,” Edward Elgar Publishing, July 21, 2026

University of Birmingham, “New Model Rules mark meaningful step towards digital inheritance laws,” July 16, 2026

Edina Harbinja, “Governing Digital Immortality: Artificial Intelligence, Deadbots and the Law,” Edward Elgar Publishing, to be published September 2026

Lilian Edwards and Edina Harbinja, “Protecting Post-Mortem Privacy: Reconsidering the Privacy Interests of the Deceased in a Digital World,” May 2013, revised November 2013

Lilian Edwards, Edina Harbinja, and Marisa McVey, “Governing Ghostbots,” Computer Law & Security Review, November 2023

SAG-AFTRA, “SAG-AFTRA Statement on Today’s Passing of California Assembly Bill 1836,” August 31, 2024

Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn’t just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.

Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.

Healthcare technology giant CareCloud has confirmed that a data breach earlier this year impacted more than 3.75 million people, making it one of the largest healthcare data incidents disclosed this year.

The New Jersey-based company, which provides electronic health record (EHR) and practice management services, first flagged the intrusion in an SEC filing back in March, but the true scope only became clear this month when the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) breach tracker updated the affected total from roughly 345,000 to 3,756,469 individuals.

CareCloud says an unauthorized third party accessed one of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments between March 10 and March 16, 2026. The intrusion caused an eight-hour disruption to one of the company’s six EHR environments before systems were restored that same evening. During a forensic investigation, CareCloud determined that the attacker claimed to have exfiltrated data from databases within that environment.

The stolen data reportedly includes both identity and medical information:

• Full names, postal addresses, and dates of birth
• Social Security numbers (SSNs) and driver’s license or passport numbers
• Medical records and health insurance information
• Bank account and financial details, plus full credit card data (including CVV) for a limited subset of victims

What affected customers should do

Anyone receiving a breach notification letter should take it seriously, given the combination of medical, identity, and financial data involved.

If you think you’ve been affected by a data breach, here are steps you can take to protect yourself:

• Check the company’s advice. Every breach is different, so check with the company to find out what’s happened and follow any specific advice it offers.
• Change your password. You can make a stolen password useless to thieves by changing it. Choose a strong password that you don’t use for anything else. Better yet, let a password manager choose one for you.
• Enable two-factor authentication (2FA). If you can, use a FIDO2-compliant hardware key, laptop, or phone as your second factor. Some forms of 2FA can be phished just as easily as a password, but 2FA that relies on a FIDO2 device can’t be phished.
• Watch out for impersonators. Cybercriminals may contact you posing as the breached company. Check its official website to see if it’s contacting victims, and verify the identity of anyone who contacts you using a different communication channel.
• Take your time. Phishing attacks often impersonate people or brands you know and use themes that require urgent attention, such as missed deliveries, account suspensions, and security alerts.
• Consider not storing your card details. It’s definitely more convenient to let sites remember your card details, but it increases the risk if a company suffers a breach.
• Set up identity monitoring. This can alert you if your personal information is found being traded illegally online and help you recover afterward.

This week on the Lock and Code podcast…

Twenty years ago, a British mathematician named Clive Humby popularized a phrase that came to describe data’s relationship with the entire global economy: “Data is the new oil.”

Pithy as the phrase sounds, it is undeniably true.

Data steers decisions at businesses of every size. Data created entirely new industries built around its capture. And, for a select number of companies, data has produced billions—if not trillions—of dollars in value.

So how is it that, on the dark web, your stolen identity can be purchased for just 95 cents?

That’s what a Malwarebytes researcher found last month after spending 48 hours inside the dark web to investigate cybercrime. Across a variety of forums and directories, he found subscription plans for malware that steals information once implanted on a device. He found guides for deploying social engineering scams. He found people selling their services to build fake websites that trick people into handing over their usernames and passwords. And he found one of the dark web’s most traded commodities—personal data, packaged together about individual people, to help a cybercriminal commit identity fraud.

These packages are called “fullz.” For victims in the United States, a fullz contains a full name, Social Security Number, date of birth, address, and other personal details. That is enough, on its own, for a cybercriminal to potentially open a bogus line of credit, file a fake tax return, access financial accounts, or obtain medical services under someone else’s name.

As we wrote on Malwarebytes Labs:

“For less than the cost of a cup of coffee, a cybercriminal can buy enough information to devastate someone’s financial life.”

It’s the kind of risk that could scare anyone, especially considering the scale behind it. In just the first six months of 2026, Malwarebytes found more than 7,500 compromised data sets on the dark web containing more than 8.4 billion records.

And yet, even today, cybersecurity professionals still get asked why anyone should bother protecting their data.

The public, understandably, are exhausted. With data breaches happening every week—if not every day—cybersecurity can start to feel pointless. With young people unable to build financial security, they start believing that they have nothing worth stealing. And with Big Tech already collecting our every movement, behavior, click, and concern, people understandably feel powerless to fight any kind of data abuse, be it corporate or criminal.

So today’s episode approaches the question from a different direction. This isn’t about why you should protect yourself—plenty of company websites will tell you that, and most of them rely on fear. This is about why hackers want your data in the first place.

Today, on the Lock and Code podcast, host David Ruiz explains how cybercriminals turn a single repeated password into account takeover, how a screenshot of your house from Google Maps became a tool in extortion emails, and why the most benign information about you—an address, an age, one public photo—is often the most useful data a stranger can buy.

Tune in today to listen to the full episode.

Show notes and credits:

Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)

Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn’t just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.

Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.

Cardiac monitoring provider iRhythm has been hit by a data theft followed by an extortion attempt.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), iRhythm revealed it was contacted by someone on June 9 who claimed to have stolen sensitive information, including proprietary data, patient PHI, and other personal information. That person demanded payment in exchange for not publishing the data.

iRhythm provides ambulatory cardiac monitoring and analysis (for example using the Zio patch) and has reportedly processed over two billion hours of heartbeat data from more than twelve million patients.

In the filing, the company said the data was obtained through social engineering and is from “certain third-party-hosted business applications”, without revealing any further details about the amount of data.

On its own website, iRhythm also doesn’t disclose much about the nature of the stolen data, but does seem to imply no financial data was affected:

“We have not identified any impact to our products, our clinical or medical device systems, our connections to customers, our manufacturing and distribution operations, patient safety, or our ability to meet patient needs. In addition, we do not store or retain individual financial account information or payment card information. 

 As we actively investigate, we will notify individuals affected by this incident in accordance with applicable law and take steps as needed to protect and remediate the impact to them.“

However, the SEC filing adds that iRhythm determined that the incident is significant, “in light of the volume of the potentially affected data.” Together with the extortionist’s claims that they have patients’ medical data, that makes the breach one worth noting if you have used iRhythm’s services.

Even without payment data, healthcare breaches have serious downstream effects:

• Attackers can craft highly convincing emails, texts, or calls that reference specific procedures or monitoring episodes (for example, “about your recent Zio patch recording”) to trick patients into sharing more data or paying fake bills.
• The breached data can be used to create a fake identity, insurance fraud, or medical identity theft.
• Exposure of cardiac and other health‑related information can be deeply sensitive and may have employment/insurance ramifications, especially if data is posted publicly or sold to data brokers.

Healthcare breach data tends to circulate for years, and victims may face sporadic fraud and phishing attempts long after the headlines fade.

How to stay safe

If you’ve used iRhythm’s services, keep an eye on your post, email, and patient portals for official breach notifications from iRhythm or your healthcare provider.

In the US, breaches of protected health information that meet certain criteria must be reported to patients and regulators. iRhythm has promised to “notify individuals affected by this incident in accordance with applicable law and take steps as needed to protect and remediate the impact to them.”

To stay out of the hands of phishers and scammers:

• When you receive a communication about the data breach, verify through other channels that it really came from iRhythm. Go directly to iRhythm’s official website or patient portal, or call a known phone number to confirm the communication is genuine.
• Be extra suspicious of emails or texts that claim to offer compensation, refunds, or other financial consequences related to this incident.
• Change passwords for your iRhythm‑linked portals and your cardiology or hospital patient portals, especially if you reused those passwords elsewhere.
• Log into your health insurer’s portal and check claims on a regular basis.
• If you see anything suspicious, report it immediately to your insurer and provider and ask them to flag your account for possible identity theft.
• Do not provide personal or financial information over the phone just because the caller knows details about you which they may have obtained from the stolen data.

Let’s face it, an incognito window can only do so much. 
 
Breaches, dark web trading, credit fraud. Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection monitors for all of it, alerts you fast, and comes with identity theft insurance.