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appen.com

Claimed by Apt73 · listed 2 years ago

922 lines
Records
20m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedOct 24, 2024
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Apt73
Status
Data leaked
Country
Australia
Sector
Technology
Listed on leak site
Oct 24, 2024
Records
922 lines

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Appen is an ASX-listed AI data company with 30 years of experience providing human-annotated datasets for training frontier AI models. They operate a platform of 1M+ vetted contributors across 500+ locales, offering specialized data services for LLMs, computer vision, speech, robotics, and model evaluation. The company is SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certified.

Industry
Artificial Intelligence Data & Annotation Services
Founded
1996

Attack summary

Severity: critical — Confirmed exfiltration of 5.9 million user records including authentication credentials (passwords) and personally identifiable information (names, emails, employers, IP addresses). This represents large-scale PII exposure with direct compromise of user account security.

Apt73 claims to have exfiltrated the registered user base of Appen's platform, containing approximately 5.9 million records with user credentials, email addresses, names, employers, and IP addresses.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • email addresses
  • names
  • passwords
  • employers
  • IP addresses

What the group claims

Registered user base of the appen.com platform (AI training company). 5 887 922 lines email addresses, employers, IP addresses, names, passwords,...

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 Apt73

APT73 is a recently emerged ransomware group that began operations in April 2024, with financial motivation as their primary driver based on their targeting patterns across multiple high-value sectors. The group has demonstrated rapid growth in their operational tempo, accumulating 78 documented victims within their first months of activity. Their targeting methodology shows a preference for English-speaking markets and major economies, with the United Kingdom and United States representing their primary focus areas, followed by significant activity in India, Brazil, and France. The group exhibits a clear preference for high-value sectors including business services, technology, financial services, and healthcare organizations, suggesting a calculated approach to victim selection based on potential payment capability and operational impact. Given the group's recent emergence and limited public documentation from major threat intelligence sources, specific details regarding their initial access vectors, tooling, encryption methods, or organizational structure remain largely unconfirmed by authoritative sources such as CISA, FBI, or established security research firms. The group's current operational status appears active based on the timeline of their emergence, though comprehensive analysis of their capabilities and infrastructure requires additional intelligence gathering and documentation by security researchers. The group has been linked to 161 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on April 22, 2024; most recent post July 6, 2026. The operation is currently inactive.

Also tracked as: Eraleign.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • October 24, 2024appen.com listed by Apt73on the group's public leak site
Records
922 lines

Other recent disclosures by Apt73

Apt73 has been linked to 161 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Apt73 dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Technology sector, which has 3,549 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, appen.com is reported in Australia, a country with 455 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Apt73 means appen.com 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, ACSC (Australia), as required for your jurisdiction.
  • Monitor for the data appearing on Apt73'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.