Black Kite’s first mid-market study finds that from 2023 through H1 2026, 73% of ransomware attacks in North America and Europe hit companies with $10M to $1B in annual revenue

BOSTON, Aug. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Black Kite, the leader in third-party cyber risk management, today released its newest report, Mid-Market Is the Routine Target: Ransomware, Third-Party Risk, and the Widening AI Gap. Assessing 120,128 mid-market organizations across North America and Europe from an attacker’s perspective, the report examines why these companies bear the brunt of ransomware attacks, and draws on disclosed incident data and external attack-surface scans to understand the pattern and what mid-market companies can do to protect themselves.

“This is the first time we examined the mid-market as a segment in its own right, rather than a set of companies scattered through larger studies,” said Ferhat Dikbiyik, Chief Research & Intelligence Officer (CRIO), Black Kite. “The report is only the beginning. We’re continuously expanding Black Kite with capabilities designed specifically for mid-market organizations, helping smaller security teams identify, prioritize, and reduce cyber risk without requiring enterprise-sized teams or budgets.”

Black Kite’s analysis of 13,336 ransomware incidents with verifiable revenue across North America and Europe from January 2023 to June 2026 found that 73% of those incidents struck mid-market organizations with annual revenues between $10M and $1B. This concentration has proven highly consistent over time: 74.6% in 2023, 72.1% in 2024, 74% in 2025, and 72.3% during the first half of 2026. Even as the absolute number of incidents grew by 44%, surging from 2,320 in 2023 to 3,340 in 2025, the proportion of mid-market targets held firm.

Additional findings from the report:

Nearly three in four (73%) ransomware victims were mid-market companies between 2023 and the first half of 2026. More than half of those victims generated less than $50M in annual revenue.The mid-market’s share of incidents has remained remarkably steady over the four year period, accounting for approximately 72-75% of victims each year, even as the absolute number of ransomware victims increased.Manufacturing was the most targeted industry, representing more than 25% of mid-market ransomware victims, followed by professional, scientific and technical services, and construction.More than one in four mid-market organizations (28.3%) carried at least one known exploited vulnerability (KEV)More than half (54.7%) had at least one significant patch management finding on public-facing software.Nearly half (48.1%) carried at least one disclosed vulnerability with a CVSS score of 8.0 or higher.Nearly one in three (32.3%) had at least one stealer log finding.Nearly half (46.8%) had missing or insufficient DMARC protection.

Why the Mid-Market Is Under Pressure
Mid-market organizations face a growing challenge. They are increasingly targeted by ransomware while also exposed to cyber risk across hundreds of third-party vendors. Both require continuous visibility and rapid response, stretching even well-resourced security teams. Mid-market companies also sit inside the vendor profile of the larger organizations they serve. Regulation on both sides of the Atlantic, from the EU’s NIS2 Directive to U.S. rules like NYCRR 500 and HIPAA, increasingly makes a customer responsible for its suppliers’ security, which puts mid-market vendors under direct pressure to prove their posture.

AI Is Widening the Gap
Artificial intelligence is accelerating the discovery of software vulnerabilities, and the same tools that help organizations find flaws in their own systems are also available to attackers. For mid-market companies with smaller security teams and tighter budgets, keeping pace is far more difficult. Published research shows many mid-sized organizations lag in adopting AI for security. ISC2’s 2025 Cybersecurity Workforce Study found that only 20% of mid-sized organizations have adopted AI tools into their security operations.

The report findings point to a clear conclusion: mid-market exposure is measurable, the obligation to address it is real, and the constraint is capacity. Organizations need security capabilities that help them identify, prioritize, and reduce cyber risk without requiring enterprise-sized teams or budgets.

To help mid-market organizations understand their own exposure, Black Kite is offering a complimentary Ransomware Susceptibility Index® (RSI™) Briefing. Based on Black Kite’s industry-leading ransomware intelligence, the briefing provides:

Your organization’s Ransomware Susceptibility Index® (RSI™)Key findings driving your ransomware riskHow your organization compares to industry peersPrioritized recommendations to reduce cyber risk

Request your complimentary RSI™ Briefing at: https://blackkite.com/free-rsi-rating

Organizations ready to go further can gain ongoing access to Black Kite’s intelligence, including RSI™, FocusTags®, and Digital Breach Intelligence (DBI), and integrate AI into their security program with Black Kite’s AI Agent. Organizations can manage the Black Kite platform either directly or through a trusted Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP).

To read the report, visit https://blackkite.com/reports/2026-mid-market-report/

Methodology
This data presented in the report was assembled by the Black Kite Research Group™ from two independent datasets: ransomware incident tracking across North America and Europe, and a snapshot of externally observable risk findings across the monitored mid-market population. The first establishes which companies were attacked. The second describes how companies of this size appear from the internet. The ransomware data spans January 2023 to June 2026 and is analyzed across seven half-year periods. The mid-market is defined by annual revenue, following the Dun & Bradstreet revenue-based definition, with no employee-count criterion applied. Three bands are reported: lower mid-market at $10M to $50M, core mid-market at $50M to $500M, and upper mid-market at $500M to $1B.

About Black Kite
Black Kite is an AI-native third-party cyber risk management platform built for the connected world. By distilling billions of external risk signals from millions of monitored organizations, Black Kite delivers the trusted intelligence that powers a connected defense network, enabling organizations to identify risk earlier, act faster, and move from isolated defense to collective resilience. With Black Kite, organizations benefit from greater control, earlier warning, and the confidence to work safely with third parties at scale. Black Kite has received numerous industry awards and recognition from customers. Learn more at www.blackkite.com, or on the Black Kite blog.

Media Contact:
Michelle Kearney
Hi-Touch PR
443-857-9468
kearney@hi-touchpr.com

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SOURCE Black Kite

New research lab debuts a public hub of 13+ publications and an open leaderboard measuring the investment biases of leading AI models

NEW YORK, Aug. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — LinqAlpha, the AI-native company building the Alpha Intelligence Layer for global public markets, today announced the launch of LinqAlpha AI Lab, a research organization dedicated to Alpha Intelligence — AI-native investment research: how AI systems understand financial information, when their judgment can be trusted, and how to build systems that turn that trust into investment performance. The Lab’s work debuts today in a dedicated Research hub at linqalpha.com/research, with new research published weekly.

The launch comes as financial institutions confront a widening gap between AI adoption and AI accountability. As banks, hedge funds, and asset managers embed large language models into research and trading, researchers and regulators are asking what happens when markets run on models whose judgment no one has measured.

The Lab’s answer is to measure trust — openly. In its peer-reviewed study Your AI, Not Your View: The Bias of LLMs in Investment Analysis, published at the ACM International Conference on AI in Finance (ICAIF), the Lab’s researchers showed that every foundation model carries measurable, persistent investment biases. To make these findings actionable, LinqAlpha has also launched a public leaderboard that benchmarks leading AI models, enabling investment teams to evaluate model behavior before deployment.

“Everyone is deploying AI in the front office. Almost no one can tell you when to trust its judgment,” said Jacob Chanyeol Choi, Co-founder and Co-CEO of LinqAlpha. “For financial AI, trustworthiness is a benchmark as vital as performance. The Lab exists to close the gap between how fast the industry is adopting AI and how little it has measured it — and to publish what we learn openly.”

The Lab is led by Professor Yongjae Lee, who joins as Chief Scientist. An Associate Professor at UNIST, Professor Lee serves on Korea’s Presidential National AI Strategy Committee and the Financial Services Commission’s AI Council; at ICAIF 2025, his group presented the most main-track papers of any single research group. Professor Alejandro Lopez-Lira of the University of Florida, recipient of the 2023 BlackRock Best Paper Prize, joins as Academic Advisor; his independent public AI-managed portfolios have attracted over $200 million from more than 50,000 investors.

“Financial AI research has often developed along separate academic and industry tracks, with academic work emphasizing methodological rigor and industry work focusing more directly on real-world workflows,” said Professor Lee. “This Lab is built to do both.”

Measuring trust is the foundation, not the destination. Building on its bias research, the Lab also studies how validated AI judgment can generate alpha signals and manage risk. In a study presented at ACL 2026, the Lab’s researchers showed that adding an LLM “filter” that vets the economic logic behind statistically discovered trading signals cut average losses by 46% in backtests. In related research, the Lab found that blending prediction-market prices with context-aware LLM forecasts yields better-calibrated event predictions than either alone, and that LLM analysis of corporate disclosures produced roughly three times the alpha of standard baselines.

LinqAlpha AI Lab launches with more than a dozen publications at venues including ICML, ACL, and ACM ICAIF, co-authored with researchers affiliated with institutions including J.P. Morgan, BlackRock, Blackstone, State Street Investment Management, Kalshi, and MIT, among others. Its contributions include the FinDER and FinAgentBench benchmark datasets and the AI for Finance Summit series, whose Boston edition was co-hosted with J.P. Morgan. The Lab’s researchers have also organized leading academic workshops in financial AI, including the ACM ICAIF AI for Finance Symposium (2024-2026), the ICLR Workshop on Advances in Financial AI (2025-2026), the NeurIPS Workshop on Generative AI in Finance (2025), the EMNLP Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing (FinNLP, 2026), and KDD Finance Day (2026).

About LinqAlpha

LinqAlpha is the AI-native company building the Alpha Intelligence Layer for global public markets. Founded by former Goldman Sachs analyst, MIT computer science PhDs and UC Berkeley MFE, LinqAlpha serves more than 70 financial institutions across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, including sell-side sales, trading, and research teams at leading investment banks, as well as hedge funds and asset managers. Collectively, LinqAlpha’s buy-side clients manage more than $5 trillion in assets. For more information, visit www.linqalpha.com.

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SOURCE LinqAlpha

CHICAGO, Aug. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas announced today that property owners can now go to cookcountytreasurer.com to view, download and pay their Second Installment bill for the 2025 Tax Year.

“If you own property in Cook County, you don’t have to wait until your tax bill arrives in the mail to see the amount due and confirm your exemptions,” Pappas said.

The Treasurer’s Office plans to mail 1.8 million bills to Cook County property owners on or before Sept. 1. Those 2025 second installment bills will be due a month later on Oct. 1.

“I encourage people to pay online, which is the quickest and most convenient way to pay,” Pappas said.

There’s no fee to pay by transferring funds directly from your bank account, and payments can be made 24 hours a day. Online payments are secure and eliminate the risk of a check being stolen from the mail.

“If you want to be proactive and pay now so you don’t have to think about it, paying online is the best way to do so,” said Pappas. If you’re unable to pay the full amount, you can make partial payments and lower the amount of interest charged on overdue taxes hopefully easing the financial strain a bit.”

Property owners who wish to view, download, print out and electronically pay their bills should visit cookcountytreasurer.com. Once there, select the blue box labeled “Pay Online for Free” and enter the address or Property Index Number (PIN).

Credit card payments are also accepted online but carry a 2.08% convenience fee paid to the credit card company.

Taxpayers also can pay at nearly 400 Chase Bank locations in Illinois, including those outside Cook County, or at more than 100 participating community banks. But you must bring your physical bill or a copy of it if you choose to pay in person at a bank. Taxpayers can also pay at the Treasurer’s Office at 118 N. Clark St., Room 112, in downtown Chicago.

Lastly, payments can be mailed to the Cook County Treasurer’s Office, with the taxpayer’s PIN, contact and property information included. The canceled check serves as the receipt.

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SOURCE Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas