Cheers is a relatively obscure ransomware group that emerged in May 2022, primarily motivated by financial gain through extortion activities targeting organizations in the United Kingdom. The group's origin and potential affiliations remain largely undocumented in public threat intelligence reporting, with limited information available about whether they operate as an independent entity or utilize a Ransomware-as-a-Service model. Based on their targeting patterns, Cheers appears to focus on critical infrastructure and essential services sectors, having affected approximately 15 known victims across transportation, finance, and healthcare industries primarily within the UK. Due to the group's relatively small victim count and limited public documentation by major security firms and law enforcement agencies, specific details about their attack methodology, encryption techniques, initial access vectors, and extortion tactics have not been widely reported or analyzed in available threat intelligence sources. The current operational status of the Cheers ransomware group remains unclear, as there is insufficient publicly available intelligence from reputable sources to definitively assess whether they remain active, have ceased operations, or undergone rebranding. The group has been linked to 15 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on May 29, 2022; most recent post September 14, 2022. The operation is currently inactive.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by Cheers means An British Financial Company -Unpay 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.
- Monitor for the data appearing on Cheers'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.
