Qilin is a ransomware group that emerged in October 2022, operating with primarily financial motivations through targeted attacks against organizations across multiple sectors. The group appears to operate independently with limited public information available regarding their specific country of origin or affiliations to other ransomware families. Qilin employs double extortion tactics, typically exfiltrating sensitive data before deploying their encryption payload, though specific details about their initial access vectors and technical tools remain less documented in public security research. The group has demonstrated a broad targeting approach, with their 1645 known victims spanning multiple countries including the United States, France, Canada, United Kingdom, and Germany, with particular focus on manufacturing, technology, healthcare, and business services sectors. Based on available intelligence reporting, Qilin remains an active threat as of recent assessments, continuing their ransomware operations without significant reported law enforcement disruption. The group has been linked to 2,399 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on October 8, 2022; most recent post October 14, 2026. The operation is currently active.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by Qilin means Joliet Public Schools District 86 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 Qilin'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, recording every new disclosure and the moment the operator says the data was released. Each entry on this page is sourced from the operator's own publication, listed by an independent tracker (RansomLook) and checked against our own capture. 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.
