Spook is a relatively obscure ransomware group that emerged in October 2021, operating with primarily financial motivations and targeting organizations across multiple sectors. The group's origin and affiliations remain largely undocumented in public threat intelligence reporting, with limited information available from major security firms regarding their operational structure or potential ties to other cybercriminal organizations. Based on observed targeting patterns, Spook has compromised approximately 35 victims across multiple countries, with a notable focus on the United Kingdom, United States, Italy, and Hungary, while primarily targeting media companies, manufacturing firms, construction organizations, and government entities. Due to the group's relatively low profile and limited public documentation from established threat intelligence sources, specific details regarding their attack methodologies, initial access vectors, encryption techniques, or extortion tactics have not been widely reported by CISA, FBI, Mandiant, or other reputable security researchers. The group has not been associated with any widely publicized high-profile attacks or notable ransomware campaigns that have gained significant attention in cybersecurity circles. Given the limited public reporting and threat intelligence coverage, the current operational status of Spook remains unclear, with insufficient documented evidence to determine whether they continue active operations, have rebranded, or ceased activities. The group has been linked to 35 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on October 4, 2021; most recent post October 19, 2021. The operation is currently inactive.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by Spook means Page Automation 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.
- Monitor for the data appearing on Spook'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.
