Was Winner School District 59-2 hit by ransomware?

Winner School District 59-2 was listed by the beast ransomware operation (United States), and stolen data was published on the group's leak site. Darkfield tracks this disclosure with the original leak post, screenshot and group context.

Who is the beast ransomware group?

beast is a ransomware operator tracked by Darkfield. See the full operator dossier for its known victims, sectors targeted, IOCs and leak-site infrastructure.

What data was leaked in the Winner School District 59-2 breach?

beast published data attributed to Winner School District 59-2. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

Winner School District 59-2

Claimed by Beast · listed 1 year ago

11m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedJul 29, 2025
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Beast
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Education
Listed on leak site: Jul 29, 2025

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Winner School District 59-2 is a public K-12 school district serving Winner, South Dakota, operating an elementary school and a combined middle/high school in a rural agricultural community in Tripp County.

Industry: Public Education
Address: 431 E 7th Street, Winner, SD 57580

Attack summary

Severity: low — No proof files, screenshots, or data samples are described or referenced in the leak post. No specific confirmation of data exfiltration or encryption. The post contains only promotional content about the town of Winner and does not establish technical compromise or data theft.

The 'beast' group claims to have compromised Winner School District 59-2. However, the leak post provided contains only generic tourism and community information about Winner, South Dakota, with no specific details about what data was exfiltrated, encrypted, or held for ransom.

low

What the group claims

Winner is located in south central South Dakota along the Oyate Trail at the crossroads of SD Highway 44 and US Highways 18 & 183. Agriculture is the backbone of our community. Tripp County is the largest cattle producer in South Dakota. Our farmers & ranchers also harvest a great deal of wheat and corn. Our open prairies and rolling hills provide an excellent habitat for a sportsman's paradise. Winner is known for top-notch pheasant hunting. Deer, turkey, prairie dogs, grouse, prairie chicken, dove, and coyotes are also hunted in the area. The Winner Youth Fishing Pond is a wonderful way to spend the afternoon fishing. Should you desire to fish on the Missouri River, it is a scenic 30 mile drive. A couple of unique landmarks to Winner are Leahy Bowl and the Winner Drive-In Theatre. If you happen to visit Winner in the summer, you will not be disappointed with the events at each of these attractions. The Winner Drive-In Theatre is one of very few Drive-Ins left in the USA. Leahy Bowl hosts many baseball games each summer and is well preserved by the community. We have many events year-round and Labor Day is our big celebration. Whether you are here for a week or the weekend or are considering relocating to a hometown with an emphasis on community and quality of life, we look forward to meeting you!

Sources

Source

Indexed 1 year 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.

Is this your supplier? Your competitor? You?

Pro plans monitor your domain, corporate emails, and crypto wallets across every new ransomware leak-site post, breach dump and Telegram callout — alerts within 5 minutes.

Disclosure context

About beast

The Beast ransomware group is a relatively new threat actor that emerged in July 2025, operating with apparent financial motivations through their ransomware campaigns. With limited public documentation available from major security agencies, the group has demonstrated activity primarily targeting victims across the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, South Korea, and Argentina, accumulating approximately 65 known victims since their emergence. Their targeting pattern shows a focus on healthcare organizations, manufacturing companies, educational institutions, and construction firms, suggesting an opportunistic approach rather than highly specialized sector expertise. The group's recent emergence means there is insufficient public intelligence from CISA, FBI, Mandiant, or other established security researchers regarding their specific attack methodologies, initial access vectors, or technical capabilities. Given the timeline of their first observation in mid-2025, Beast represents an active and emerging threat with their current operational status remaining unclear due to limited threat intelligence reporting from authoritative sources. The group has been linked to 104 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on July 29, 2025; most recent post June 11, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

July 29, 2025Winner School District 59-2 listed by beaston the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by beast

beast has been linked to 104 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full beast dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Education sector, which has 1,082 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Winner School District 59-2 is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by beast means Winner School District 59-2 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, CISA (United States), as required for your jurisdiction.
Monitor for the data appearing on beast'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.