The Snake ransomware group is a relatively obscure threat actor that emerged in May 2020 with a financially motivated agenda, having conducted a limited number of documented attacks with only three known victims to date. The group's origin and affiliations remain largely unknown, with insufficient public documentation from major security firms or law enforcement agencies to determine their country of origin, operational structure, or potential connections to other cybercriminal organizations. Based on limited available data, Snake appears to target critical infrastructure sectors including Critical Manufacturing, Healthcare and Public Health, and Energy, with observed activity spanning Argentina and Germany, though their specific attack methodologies, initial access vectors, and technical capabilities have not been extensively documented by reputable security researchers. Due to the group's limited operational footprint and lack of high-profile campaigns or major incidents reported by CISA, FBI, or established threat intelligence firms, there are no notable campaigns or significant ransoms on record that would warrant detailed analysis. The current operational status of the Snake ransomware group remains unclear given the sparse public intelligence available about their activities beyond the initial observation period. The group has been linked to 3 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on May 4, 2020; most recent post June 7, 2020. The operation is currently inactive.
Also tracked as: Turla, VENOMOUS Bear, Group 88, Waterbug.
Sector and geography
This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Healthcare and Public Health sector, which has 54 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Fresenius SE & Co. is reported in Germany, a country with 926 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by snake means Fresenius SE & Co. appeared on a ransomware extortion site and data attributed to it has been published. If this is your organisation, or a supplier you depend on, the priority is to confirm the intrusion and contain it before the window to act closes.
- Engage your incident-response team and preserve forensic evidence before remediating — do not wipe affected systems first.
- Force a password reset and revoke active sessions for exposed accounts; rotate any credentials, API keys or certificates that may have been in the stolen data.
- Assess regulatory notification duties (GDPR, NIS2, sector regulators) — many carry a 72-hour reporting clock from awareness.
- Report the incident to your national CERT, CERT-Bund (Germany), as required for your jurisdiction.
- Monitor for the data appearing on snake's leak site and across paste and breach channels, and brief downstream partners who may be exposed through you.
How we know this. Darkfield monitors public ransomware leak sites continuously, archiving every new disclosure and the data later released against the victim. Each entry on this page is sourced from the operator's own publication and cross-checked against complementary OSINT feeds (RansomLook, ransomware.live, RansomWatch). We do not collect or host stolen data — only the metadata, timestamps and screenshots needed to make the public disclosure searchable and accountable. Records here are corrected when the original post is edited, retracted, or merged with another disclosure.
