Tuesday dawned dark for both cybersecurity and software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, and as of 10 a.m. ET, shares of Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ: PANW), (NASDAQ: MSFT), and Cloudflare (NYSE: NET) remain down 1.5%, 2.1%, and 4.7%, respectively.

While the situation surrounding each company has its specifics (Cloudflare for instance reported strong earnings last week, Palo Alto is getting ready to report its earnings next week, and Microsoft is preparing an update on its Xbox business on Thursday), hackers appear to be the common reason behind today's declines.

The Hacker News reported this morning on a couple of recent high-profile hacking incidents involving two of the companies on this list. In the first, Russian (allegedly) state-sponsored hacker group Midnight Blizzard has been blamed for using "a password spray strategy" to break in to the OAuth app to read the emails of some Microsoft senior staff and employees. Microsoft itself described this particular hack attack as beginning in November 2023.

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Source Fool.com