Was Unknown hit by ransomware?

Unknown was listed by the Moneymessage ransomware operation as a victim being extorted; data had not been published at the time of listing. Darkfield tracks this disclosure with the original leak post, screenshot and group context.

Who is the Moneymessage ransomware group?

Moneymessage is a ransomware operator tracked by Darkfield. See the full operator dossier for its known victims, sectors targeted, IOCs and leak-site infrastructure.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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Forestdale

listed as Unknown · Claimed by Moneymessage · listed 2 months ago

Age

since listed · listed for ransom

Status timeline

ListedMay 16, 2026

Current state: Listed for ransom

At a glance

Group: Moneymessage
Status: Listed for ransom
Sector: Child Welfare & Social Services
Listed on leak site: May 16, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Forestdale is a nonprofit child welfare agency headquartered in Queens, New York, providing foster care, adoption services, and family support programs. The organization partners with schools, religious organizations, and community leaders to address the root causes of family crises. It operates from three offices serving families across Brooklyn and Queens, with an annual revenue of approximately $40 million.

Industry: Child Welfare & Social Services
Address: Queens, New York (additional offices in Brooklyn Heights and Brooklyn), NY, USA

Attack summary

Severity: critical — The victim is a child welfare agency handling highly sensitive data on abused, neglected, and fostered children — among the most vulnerable populations. A claimed 2TB exfiltration of 'sensitive private data' from such an organization almost certainly encompasses regulated PII, child welfare records, and data on minors, warranting a critical severity classification.

The Moneymessage group claims to have exfiltrated approximately 2TB of sensitive private data from Forestdale, with the post indicating the data will be published ('Wait for data'), suggesting exfiltration has occurred but full release is pending.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Sensitive private data (2TB)
Child welfare records (inferred)
Foster care and adoption case files (inferred)
Family and minor PII (inferred)

The leak post

captured from the group's site

```
[{"incidentDate":"2026.05.14","data":{"timer":{"isEnabled":false,"expirationTime":"2025-06-30T00:00:00.000+00:00"},"incidentDate":"14.05.2026","rssDescription":"","description":"","images":[""],"links":["http:\/\/yj47lnj76t3b6rj6wuutdnvui6wxqliepmzqik7rmrbfbpmvj23qurqd.onion\/"],"downloadFiles":[{"file":"\/pub\/029\/","text":""}]}},{"incidentDate":"2026.05.11","data":{"name":"Forestdale","timer":{"isEnabled":false,"expirationTime":"2026-05-10T12:00:00.000-08:00"},"incidentDate":"11.05.2026","description":"Forestdale is a child welfare agency headquartered in Queens. In addition to ensuring the well-being of abused and neglected children through foster care and adoption services, Forestdale partners with schools, religious organizations, business owners, and community leaders to address the root causes of family crises. The three-and-a-half-acre campus includes open fields, a basketball court, and a JetBlue playground. In 2020, Forestdale received a multimillion-dollar contract to provide services throughout Brooklyn and open offices approximately half a mile from its original location in Brooklyn Heights. Forestdale operates from three offices to better serve families in Brookl…

Sources

Source

Indexed 2 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 Moneymessage

Moneymessage is a relatively new ransomware group that emerged in March 2023, operating with primarily financial motivations and targeting organizations across multiple sectors globally. Given the group's recent emergence and limited public documentation from major security agencies, detailed information about their origin and affiliations remains largely unknown, though their targeting patterns suggest they may operate as a smaller independent operation rather than a large-scale RaaS model. The group has demonstrated a broad targeting approach across healthcare, business services, public sector, government, and financial organizations, with their 29 documented victims spanning geographically diverse regions including the United States, Italy, Argentina, Bangladesh, and Russia, though specific attack methodologies and technical capabilities have not been extensively documented by major threat intelligence firms. Notable campaigns and high-profile attacks attributed to Moneymessage have not been widely reported by established security researchers or law enforcement agencies, likely due to the group's relatively recent emergence and smaller scale of operations compared to more prominent ransomware families. The group appears to remain active as of available reporting, though comprehensive analysis of their current operational status is limited by the lack of detailed public documentation from authoritative sources such as CISA, FBI, or major cybersecurity firms. The group has been linked to 34 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on March 29, 2023; most recent post July 9, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Also tracked as: money message.

Timeline of this disclosure

May 16, 2026Unknown listed by Moneymessageon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Moneymessage

Moneymessage has been linked to 34 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Moneymessage dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Child Welfare & Social Services sector.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Moneymessage means Unknown appeared on a ransomware extortion site and is being pressured to pay before any publication. 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 Moneymessage'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.