The Michigan-founded Stryker, which employs around 56,000 globally, made more than $25bn in revenues last year.

An Iran-linked hacking group has claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on the medical equipment manufacturing giant Stryker.

In a statement posted yesterday (11 March), Stryker said that a cyberattack had caused it a global network disruption. “We have no indication of ransomware or malware and believe the incident is contained,” the company said.

In a regulatory filing, Stryker admitted that the incident cut off access to some of its information systems and business applications, affecting operations. It did not know when systems would be fully restored. Bloomberg noted an earlier memo where Stryker said that the attack had pummelled its networks.

Pro-Iranian cyber group Handala has claimed responsibility for the attack, marking what looks to be the first major cyber disruption of a US organisation since the US-Israel war on Iran began on 28 February.

“Our major cyber operation has been executed with complete success”, wrote the X account seemingly belonging to Handala, claiming that the attack was in retaliation for the “brutal attack on the Minab school” and for “ongoing cyber assaults against the infrastructure of the Axis of Resistance.”

In the post, the group claimed the attack “wiped”more than 200,000 systems, servers and mobile devices, and that 50TB of critical data had been extracted. The group also claimed that Stryker’s offices in 79 countries have been forced to shut down.

“You did not take our warning seriously and entered the dangerous  game of attacking infrastructure; now you are witnessing the most powerful and extensive cyberattack in recent years,” a different post on the page read.

The Michigan-founded Stryker has around 56,000 employees and made more than $25bn in revenue last year producing equipment such as orthopaedic implants, surgical instruments and hospital beds.

Reports suggest that the company’s Cork plant, which employs more than 4,000, was affected by the attack. Stryker also has factories in Limerick and Belfast. The Wall Street Journal reported that outages began in the US before spreading globally.

Smarttech247’s director of operations Ken Sheehan said that there is evidence that Handala is targeting infrastructure and service providers globally in order to maximise disruption.

“A number of reports are now linking this group to attacks targeting at least one business with operations in Ireland, which is concerning,” he said.

“Since the latest hostilities erupted in the Middle East, we have been advising clients that the cyber risk would be increasing and extreme vigilance is required to guard against these kinds of attacks.”

He recommended that organisations enhance cybersecurity awareness training, particularly around phishing and other social engineering attacks. Sheehan said that Handala’s main attack vector is still by phishing.

Following its attack on Stryker on Wednesday, Handala’s supposed X page also claimed a cyberattack on Israeli fintech Verifone. Verifone, however, said that it found no evidence of such an attack.

“We have observed recent allegations on March 11 2026 from threat actors claiming an intrusion into our systems in Israel,” a Verifone spokesperson told the Register. “Verifone has found no evidence of any incident related to this claim and has no service disruption to our clients.”

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England Hockey, the governing body for field hockey in England, is investigating a potential data breach after the AiLock ransomware gang listed it as a victim on its data leak site.

The threat actor allegedly stole 129GB of data from the organization’s systems and announced that it will soon publish the files, unless a ransom is paid.

England Hockey is aware of the threat actor’s claims and has prioritized an inquiry that involves both internal teams and external experts to determine what happened.

“We are aware of an incident involving England Hockey and are currently investigating the matter as a priority,” the field hockey organization said in a statement for BleepingComputer.

“As part of this investigation, we recently became aware of a post from the group claiming to be responsible for this incident,” a representative said.

The organization is responsible for running, regulating, and developing the sport of field hockey nationwide, from grassroots participation to elite national teams. It has a membership of more than 800 clubs across the country, 150,000 registered club players, and 15,000 coaches, umpires, and officials.

England Hockey states that it cannot comment on specific details at the moment because of the ongoing investigation.

“We take data security matters extremely seriously, and understanding what, if any, data may have been impacted in this incident is a top priority of our ongoing investigation,” assured England Hockey.

AiLock is a relatively new ransomware operation that engages in double-extortion attacks. It was documented on April 1st, 2025, by researchers at cybersecurity company Zscaler, who noted that the threat actor was “leveraging sophisticated extortion tactics targeting enterprise networks.”

The hackers reportedly use privacy law violations as leverage in negotiations. They give victims 72 hours to respond and start negotiating, and wait five days for the payment under the threat of leaking stolen data and destroying recovery tools.

According to past analysis from S2W Talon’s researcher Huiseong Yang, the ransomware uses ChaCha20 and NTRUEncrypt to lock files, appending the .AILock extension to the encrypted copies, and leaving ransom notes in all impacted directories.

While England Hockey hasn’t confirmed a data breach yet, players in the country should be vigilant for suspicious account activity and phishing attempts, and treat unsolicited communications with caution.

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Google has released emergency security updates to patch two high-severity Chrome vulnerabilities exploited in zero-day attacks.

“Google is aware that exploits for both CVE-2026-3909 & CVE-2026-3910 exist in the wild,” Google said in a security advisory published on Thursday.

The first zero-day (CVE-2026-3909) stems from an out-of-bounds write weakness in Skia, an open-source 2D graphics library responsible for rendering web content and user interface elements, which attackers can exploit to crash the web browser or even gain code execution.

The second one (CVE-2026-3910) is described as an inappropriate implementation vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine.

Google discovered both security flaws and patched them within two days of reporting for users in the Stable Desktop channel, with new versions rolling out to Windows (146.0.7680.75), macOS (146.0.7680.76), and Linux systems (146.0.7680.75).

While Google says the out-of-band update could take days or weeks to reach all users, it was immediately available when BleepingComputer checked for updates earlier today.

If you don’t want to update your web browser manually, you can also have it check for updates automatically and install them at the next launch.

​Although Google found evidence that attackers are exploiting this zero-day flaw in the wild, the company didn’t share further details regarding these incidents.

“Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix. We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven’t yet fixed,” it noted.

These are the second and third actively exploited Chrome zero-days patched since the start of 2026. The first, tracked as CVE-2026-2441 and described as an iterator invalidation bug in CSSFontFeatureValuesMap (Chrome’s implementation of CSS font feature values), was addressed in mid-February.

Last year, Google fixed a total of eight zero-days exploited in the wild, many of which were reported by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), a group of security researchers known for tracking and identifying zero-days exploited in spyware attacks.

On Thursday, Google also revealed that it has paid over $17 million to 747 security researchers who reported security flaws through its Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP) in 2025.

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iGarden’s claims of providing 10 hours of running time in floor-only mode were accurate in my testing; however, I achieved only about seven hours of operation in the more power-intensive full coverage mode. That’s still plenty of juice for two or three full cleanings before a recharge is needed. Officially, iGarden specs the robot to clean pools of up to 1,274 square feet in size.

I was less enamored with the cleanup process after operations were complete, and not just because the robot must be retrieved with a pole instead of coming to the surface when done. The filter basket is plenty large, but it can only be accessed through a relatively small hatch. It’s tough to get all the debris out through this hatch by hosing it down, particularly since the shape of the basket includes a kind of shelf on the inside, where debris is both hard to reach and hard to see. A more open basket design or a larger hatch would be a huge help come cleanup time.

Photograph: Chris Null

The basic box is designed with a fine-mesh filter on all sides, but this can be enhanced with a reusable second filter, included in the box, that snaps onto the outside of the basket. This filter has a finer mesh count than the filter on the basket itself, but despite that, most users probably won’t need it. I didn’t find it made much of a difference in my tests, but those facing problems with lots of fine-grained dirt and sand may find it helpful.

A Massive Price Cut

At $1,599, iGarden has aggressively priced this robot, knocking $1,000 off the price of last year’s K Pro 150 while keeping performance more or less the same. That makes this a much more enticing buy than the K series, and while it’s still a bit on the high side, it’s now roughly in line with a number of other top-shelf robots on the market. If you don’t mind getting a little wet when it comes time to retrieve and clean out the robot, it should be a very strong candidate for the job as your robotic pool guy.

Anyone who saw Back to the Future II was disappointed when 2015 rolled around with nary a hoverboard in sight. There have been various attempts to fake it, but none of them quite have the feel of floating about wherever you’d like to go that the movie conveys. The little-known YouTuber [Colin Furze] has a new take on the idea: use magnets. Really big magnets.

If you’re one of [Colin]’s handful of subscribers, then you probably saw his magnetic-suspension bike. We passed on that one, but we couldn’t resist the urge to cover the hoverboard version, regardless of how popular [Colin] might be on YouTube. It’s actually stupidly simple: the suspension is provided by the repulsive force between alarmingly large neodymium magnets. In this case, two are on the base plate that holds the skateboard ‘trucks’, and two are on the wooden ‘deck’ that [Colin] rides upon.

Of course magnetic repulsion is a very unstable equilibrium, so [Colin] had to reduce the degrees of freedom. In his first test, that was with a pair of rods and linear bearings. That way the deck could only move in the z-axis, providing the sensation of hovering without allowing the deck to slide off its magnetic perch. Unfortunately those pins transferred too much vibration from the ground into the deck, ruining the illusion of floating on air.

After realizing that he’d never be able to ollie (jump) this massive beast of a skateboard, [Colin] decides he might as well use a longboard instead. Longboards, as the name implies, are long skateboards, and are for transportation, not tricks. The longboard gets the same massive magnets, but after a couple of iterations to find a smoother solution — including a neat but unsuccessful tensegrity-inspired version — ends up with a pair of loosely-fitted pins once again, though relocated to the rear of the board. From the rider’s perspective, it looks exactly like a hoverboard, since you can’t see underneath from that angle. According to [Colin], it feels like a hoverboard, too.

The only way to do better would be with eddy currents over copper, or superconductors over a magnetic track, but both of those methods limit you to very specific locations. This might be a bit of a fakeout, but its one with a degree of freedom. One, to be specific. You have to admit, it’s still less of a fake than the handle-less Segway we got in 2015, at least.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? I started slow, because 1-Across stumped me, but the rest of the answers came quickly. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

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Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Blues, e.g.
Answer: MUSIC

6A clue: Late actress Catherine of “Schitt’s Creek”
Answer: OHARA

7A clue: List included with a board game
Answer: RULES

8A clue: April Fools’ shenanigan
Answer: PRANK

9A clue: Greek god of the underworld
Answer: HADES

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Transform gradually
Answer: MORPH

2D clue: “Star Trek” officer portrayed by Zoe Saldaña
Answer: UHURA

3D clue: Greens, e.g.
Answer: SALAD

4D clue: Woman’s name that’s an anagram of ERNIE
Answer: IRENE

5D clue: Containers for reds and whites
Answer: CASKS