Was Monterey Mushrooms hit by ransomware?

Monterey Mushrooms was listed by the Payouts King ransomware operation (United States), and stolen data was published on the group's leak site. Darkfield tracks this disclosure with the original leak post, screenshot and group context.

Who is the Payouts King ransomware group?

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

What data was leaked in the Monterey Mushrooms breach?

Payouts King published data attributed to Monterey Mushrooms. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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Monterey Mushrooms

Claimed by Payouts King · listed 11 months ago

10m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedSep 3, 2025
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Payouts King
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Agriculture and Food Production
Listed on leak site: Sep 3, 2025

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Monterey Mushrooms is a multinational mushroom company founded in 1971 and headquartered in Watsonville, California. The company cultivates, packs, and distributes a wide range of fresh, dried, and organic mushrooms for retail, foodservice, and ingredient markets across North America and internationally. It is one of the largest commercial mushroom producers in the United States.

Industry: Mushroom Cultivation & Distribution
Address: Watsonville, California, United States
Employees: 501-1000
Founded: 1971

Attack summary

Severity: high — Data has been published by the threat actor against a significant multinational agricultural/food production company, indicating confirmed exfiltration; the company employs hundreds of workers and likely holds employee PII, financial, and operational data.

The group 'payoutsking' claims to have compromised Monterey Mushrooms and has published data (disclosed status: data_published), though the leak post does not specify whether encryption occurred or detail the volume of exfiltrated data.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Internal business documents
Employee/HR records
Operational data
Financial records

Original description

AI-summarised, not from the leak post

Monterey Mushrooms, founded in 1971 and headquartered in Watsonville, California, is a multinational company that cultivates, packs, and distributes fresh market mushrooms for retail, foodservice, and ingredient markets. Its product portfolio includes various types of mushrooms, such as white, brown, specialty, and organic mushrooms.

Sources

Source

Indexed 11 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 Payouts King

Payouts King Group. We are not RaaS. No affiliates are accepted. We use Tox messaging protocol. The group has been linked to 100 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on July 7, 2025; most recent post May 13, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Also tracked as: payoutsking.

Timeline of this disclosure

September 3, 2025Monterey Mushrooms listed by Payouts Kingon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Payouts King

Payouts King has been linked to 100 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Payouts King dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Agriculture and Food Production sector, which has 772 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Monterey Mushrooms is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Payouts King means Monterey Mushrooms 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 Payouts King'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.