Was CPJ.ORG hit by ransomware?

CPJ.ORG was listed by the clop 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 clop ransomware group?

clop 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 CPJ.ORG breach?

clop published data attributed to CPJ.ORG. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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Committee to Protect Journalists

listed as CPJ.ORG · Claimed by Clop · listed 6 months ago

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedJan 8, 2026
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Clop
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Public Sector
Listed on leak site: Jan 8, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is a non-profit organization based in New York dedicated to defending press freedom and the rights of journalists worldwide. It monitors violations against press freedom, documents attacks on journalists, and provides safety resources and guidance to journalists operating in dangerous environments.

Industry: Non-profit / Press Freedom Advocacy
Address: New York, US
Founded: 1981

Attack summary

Severity: high — CPJ maintains sensitive information about journalists, sources, and security operations globally. Compromise of this data could directly endanger journalists and sources in repressive countries. The organization's mission-critical nature and the potential harm to vulnerable journalists worldwide elevates this to high severity despite lack of explicit proof count.

The Clop ransomware group claims to have attacked CPJ.org. The group's post indicates data exfiltration, though the specific details of what data was taken and whether encryption occurred are not explicitly stated in the available leak post excerpt.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Journalist contacts and sources
Internal communications
Safety and security documentation
Organizational records

Original description

AI-summarised, not from the leak post

CPJ.ORG, or the Committee to Protect Journalists, is a non-profit organization based in New York. Its mission is to promote press freedom worldwide and defend the rights of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal. It does this by monitoring and documenting violations against press freedom and providing safety guides and other resources for journalists.

Sources

Victim siteCPJ.ORG
Leak posthttp://santat7kpllt6iyvqbr7q4amdv6dzrh6paatvyrzl7ry3zm72zigf4ad.onion/cpj-org

Source

Indexed 6 months 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 clop

Clop (also stylized as "Cl0p") is a financially motivated ransomware group and cybercriminal enterprise that emerged in early 2020 as an evolution of the earlier CryptoMix ransomware family, operating primarily for monetary extortion against large enterprise targets. The group is widely assessed by Mandiant, CISA, and other reputable researchers to have ties to Russian-speaking cybercriminal actors, with some researchers linking their operations to the broader FIN11 threat cluster; they operate a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model while also conducting direct intrusion operations. Clop is particularly distinguished for its aggressive exploitation of zero-day and n-day vulnerabilities in managed file transfer (MFT) and enterprise software platforms as primary initial access vectors, most notably the exploitation of Accellion FTA (2020-2021), Fortra GoAnywhere MFT (CVE-2023-0669), and the MOVEit Transfer vulnerability (CVE-2023-34362) in 2023, and consistently employs double extortion tactics — exfiltrating sensitive data prior to or in lieu of encryption and threatening public disclosure on their dedicated leak site to coerce payment. Clop has been responsible for some of the most impactful ransomware campaigns on record, with their 2023 MOVEit exploitation campaign alone affecting over 1,000 organizations globally and impacting entities including Shell, the U.S. Department of Energy, British Airways, and numerous U.S. federal agencies, with the broader campaign representing one of the largest mass-exploitation events in ransomware history; Ukrainian law enforcement arrested six individuals linked to Clop operations in June 2021, though the group's core leadership is assessed to remain outside of effective law enforcement jurisdiction. As of the most recent publicly available intelligence, Clop remains active, continuing to leverage vulnerability exploitation campaigns against enterprise file transfer solutions and maintaining a victim count exceeding 1,250 known organizations, with consistent targeting concentrated in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany across technology, business services, manufacturing, and consumer services sectors. The group has been linked to 1,254 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on March 13, 2020; most recent post May 1, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Also tracked as: Cl0p.

Timeline of this disclosure

January 8, 2026CPJ.ORG listed by clopon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by clop

clop has been linked to 1,254 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full clop dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Public Sector sector, which has 466 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, CPJ.ORG is reported in United States, a country with 3,115 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by clop means CPJ.ORG 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 clop'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.