Maze ransomware group emerged in October 2019 as a financially motivated cybercriminal organization that pioneered the "double extortion" model, threatening to publicly leak stolen victim data if ransom demands were not met. The group is believed to have originated from Russia or Eastern Europe based on their operational patterns and was suspected of having connections to the earlier Chacha ransomware, operating as an independent group rather than a ransomware-as-a-service model. Maze operators primarily gained initial access through exploit kits, RDP brute force attacks, and spear-phishing campaigns, utilizing tools like Cobalt Strike for lateral movement and typically exfiltrating sensitive data before deploying their custom ransomware that used a combination of RSA and ChaCha20 encryption algorithms. The group became notorious for high-profile attacks against major organizations including Cognizant, Xerox, LG Electronics, and several healthcare systems during the COVID-19 pandemic, with ransom demands often reaching millions of dollars and their leak site regularly publishing stolen data from non-paying victims. Maze officially announced their retirement in November 2020, claiming they were ceasing operations and transferring some of their affiliates to other ransomware operations like Egregor. The group has been linked to 59 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on October 21, 2019; most recent post September 11, 2020. The operation is currently inactive.
Sector and geography
This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Emergency Services sector, which has 9 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, VirtualGuard 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.
