Desolator is a relatively new ransomware group that emerged in August 2025, with financial motivation as their primary driver based on their ransomware operations. The group appears to operate independently with limited public information available regarding their country of origin or affiliations with other cybercriminal organizations. Due to the recent emergence of this group and limited public reporting from major security firms, specific details about their attack methodology, initial access vectors, and encryption techniques have not been extensively documented by CISA, FBI, or established security researchers. The group has claimed a small number of victims across diverse geographic regions including Colombia, the United States, and Vietnam, with their targeting spanning construction, technology, and other unspecified sectors, suggesting an opportunistic rather than highly targeted approach. No major high-profile attacks or significant ransoms have been publicly attributed to Desolator at this time, likely due to their recent emergence and limited operational scope. The group appears to remain active as of their recent emergence, though their operational tempo and long-term viability remain unclear given the lack of extensive public documentation of their activities. The group has been linked to 4 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on August 30, 2025; most recent post September 1, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.
Sector and geography
This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Not Found sector, which has 4,859 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, LEVEL is reported in United States, a country with 7,392 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.
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.
