Sparta is a ransomware group that emerged in September 2022 with an apparent financial motivation, having targeted at least 16 known victims since their initial observation. The group's country of origin and potential affiliations with other ransomware operations remain unclear based on publicly available threat intelligence reporting. Due to the limited public documentation from major cybersecurity firms and government agencies, specific details about Sparta's attack methodology, including their preferred initial access vectors, encryption techniques, and whether they employ double or triple extortion tactics, have not been extensively reported in open-source intelligence. Similarly, no major high-profile attacks or significant law enforcement actions targeting this group have been publicly documented by CISA, FBI, or established security research organizations. Given the relatively small victim count and limited public visibility compared to more prominent ransomware groups, Sparta's current operational status and activities remain largely undocumented in mainstream threat intelligence reporting. The group has been linked to 16 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on September 13, 2022; most recent post September 22, 2022. The operation is currently inactive.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by Sparta means Auto88 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 Sparta'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.
