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Lactanet

listed as lactanet.ca · Claimed by Blackbasta · listed 2 years ago

26m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedMay 21, 2024
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Blackbasta
Status
Data leaked
Country
Canada
Sector
Agriculture and Food Production
Listed on leak site
May 21, 2024

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Lactanet is a Canadian partnership between CanWest DHI, CDN, and Valacta that provides dairy herd improvement services, genetic evaluation, and milk analysis to Canadian dairy farmers. The organization operates three laboratories, processes approximately 3 million DHI samples annually, and serves over 3,500 dairy herds across Canada.

Industry
Dairy Herd Management & Genetic Evaluation Services
Address
660 Speedvale Avenue West, Suite 101, Guelph, Ontario N1K 1E5, Canada

Attack summary

Severity: high — Confirmed exfiltration of significant scale (520 GB+) involving employee PII, operational/laboratory data from a critical agricultural information service, and herd genetic data. The breadth of data types and volume indicates substantial business disruption potential for Canadian dairy industry stakeholders.

BlackBasta claims to have exfiltrated approximately 520 GB of data from Lactanet, including corporate records, employee/user data, and laboratory data. The group has published the claim on their leak site but proof files were not detailed in the provided excerpt.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Corporate data
  • Employee and user records
  • Laboratory data
  • Genetic evaluation databases
  • Herd management records
  • Milk analysis results
  • Financial/operational records

What the group claims

Lactanet is a partnership between CanWest DHI, CDN, and Valacta, which brings together leading dairy herd improvement organizations in Canada. The partnership provides Canadian dairy farmers with tools necessary for success, combining the strengths of the three partners to face industry challenges. CanWest DHI, established in 2004, offers herd management products and services to over 3,500 herds across five provinces, operating three labs and conducting about 3 million DHI samples annually. Valacta, the dairy production center of expertise, improves dairy farm profitability and sustainability by raising producers’ awareness of various aspects of dairy production. CDN serves as the national genetic evaluation center for dairy cattle, providing data management and information services to dairy herd improvement agencies, A.I. organizations, and Dairy Farmers of Canada. Lactanet’s recent release of Canada’s Best Managed Dairy Herds for 2023 highlights top dairy farms recognized for outstanding herd scores, contributing to excellence within the Canadian dairy industry. The organization’s annual reports showcase top managed herds, publishable herd data, statistics, benchmarks, and articles from dairy experts, providing insights into the Canadian dairy sector. Additionally, Lactanet’s directory includes professionals like geneticists who play key roles in the organizationSITE: www.lactanet.ca Address : 660 Speedvale Avenue West, Suite 101, Guelph, Ontario N1K 1E5 CANADAALL DATA SIZE: ≈520gb+ 1. Corporate data 2. Employees, users data 3. Lab data And much more…

Sources

Source

Indexed 2 years ago

This page surfaces a public ransomware disclosure indexed by Darkfield. Original posts come from the operator's own leak site; we cross-check against ransomware.live, RansomLook and RansomWatch where applicable. Share this URL freely.

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Disclosure context

About blackbasta

Black Basta is a highly sophisticated ransomware group that emerged in April 2022 and operates with a primary motivation of financial extortion, having rapidly established itself as one of the most prolific ransomware operations of the modern era with over 500 confirmed victims globally. The group is widely assessed by researchers including Mandiant and CISA to have likely ties to former members of the Conti ransomware syndicate following that group's dissolution in mid-2022, and operates as a private Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model with a closed affiliate structure rather than open recruitment, with suspected links to the FIN7 threat actor cluster based on observed tooling overlaps documented by SentinelOne and Microsoft. Black Basta employs a double extortion methodology, exfiltrating sensitive victim data prior to encryption and threatening publication on their Tor-based leak site "Basta News" to compound pressure on victims; initial access is predominantly achieved through phishing campaigns, purchase of stolen credentials, and exploitation of known vulnerabilities including QakBot malware distribution, with the group subsequently deploying tools such as Cobalt Strike, SystemBC, and their custom encryptor targeting both Windows and VMware ESXi environments using a ChaCha20 encryption algorithm. Per CISA and FBI joint advisory AA24-131A published in May 2024, the group has struck over 500 organizations across North America, Europe, and Australia, with high-profile victims including Ascension Health, Capita, the American Dental Association, and Rheinmetall, demonstrating a clear preference for manufacturing, business services, technology, transportation, and food production sectors across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Italy. As of the time of available public reporting, Black Basta remained operationally active, though internal chat logs leaked in early 2025 revealed significant internal tensions and potential organizational fragmentation that security researchers assessed could impact the group's near-term operational cohesion. The group has been linked to 523 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on April 26, 2022; most recent post January 11, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • May 21, 2024lactanet.ca listed by blackbastaon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by blackbasta

blackbasta has been linked to 523 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full blackbasta dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Agriculture and Food Production sector, which has 774 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, lactanet.ca is reported in Canada, a country with 316 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by blackbasta means lactanet.ca 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, CCCS (Canada), as required for your jurisdiction.
  • Monitor for the data appearing on blackbasta'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.