Skip to main content
Darkfield

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

New Jersey School Boards Association

listed as njsba.com · Claimed by Abyss · listed 3 years ago

529 GB
Data size
34m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedSep 10, 2023
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Abyss
Status
Data leaked
Country
United States
Sector
Education
Listed on leak site
Sep 10, 2023
Data size
529 GB

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

The New Jersey School Boards Association (NJSBA) is a statewide organization based in New Jersey, United States, that represents and supports local boards of education. It provides training, legal guidance, policy advocacy, and resources to public school districts across New Jersey. As a membership association serving hundreds of school boards, it handles sensitive data related to school districts, staff, and governance.

Industry
Education Policy & School Board Association

Attack summary

Severity: critical — 529 GB of published data from a statewide education association likely contains large-scale PII (staff, potentially student-adjacent records), financial data, and sensitive governance/legal documents across hundreds of member school districts; data has been confirmed published.

The Abyss ransomware group claims to have exfiltrated 529 GB of uncompressed data from NJSBA and has published the data, indicating confirmed exfiltration with no ransom payment resolution.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • School district records
  • Member board of education data
  • Staff and personnel information
  • Legal and policy documents
  • Financial records
  • Administrative files

What the group claims

NJSBA , 529Gb uncompressed data

Sources

Source

Indexed 3 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.

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 Abyss

Abyss is a relatively new ransomware group that emerged in March 2023, operating with primarily financial motivations and targeting organizations across multiple sectors with a focus on English-speaking countries. The group's origin and affiliations remain largely undocumented by major security agencies, though their targeting patterns suggest they operate independently rather than as a Ransomware-as-a-Service model. Their attack methodology and specific tools have not been extensively documented by major threat intelligence firms, though their victim profile of 87 organizations indicates they employ effective initial access techniques to compromise business services, technology, healthcare, and agriculture sectors. The group demonstrates a clear geographic preference for targets in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland, and Hong Kong, suggesting either language preferences or specific regional access capabilities. Due to the group's recent emergence and relatively limited public documentation from established security researchers, detailed information about notable campaigns, encryption methods, or law enforcement actions remains scarce. Abyss appears to remain active as of current reporting, though the lack of extensive public analysis by major threat intelligence organizations suggests they may operate at a smaller scale compared to more prominent ransomware families. The group has been linked to 103 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on March 21, 2023; most recent post June 7, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • September 10, 2023njsba.com listed by Abysson the group's public leak site
Data size
529 GB

Other recent disclosures by Abyss

Abyss has been linked to 103 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Abyss 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, njsba.com is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Abyss means njsba.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, CISA (United States), as required for your jurisdiction.
  • Monitor for the data appearing on Abyss'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.