Disclosure context

About Karakurt

Karakurt is a ransomware group that emerged in December 2022, operating primarily as a data extortion threat actor with financial motivations rather than traditional file encryption. The group's origin and affiliations remain largely undocumented by major cybersecurity agencies, though their operational patterns suggest they function as an independent entity rather than a confirmed ransomware-as-a-service operation. Karakurt employs data theft and extortion tactics, focusing on exfiltrating sensitive information from victim networks before demanding payment under threat of public disclosure, representing a pure extortion model that bypasses traditional encryption-based ransomware approaches. The group has targeted 74 known victims across multiple sectors, with particular focus on healthcare, education, manufacturing, energy, and professional services organizations, primarily affecting entities in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, and India. Based on available reporting from established cybersecurity agencies and researchers, Karakurt appears to remain active as of recent assessments, though comprehensive intelligence on their specific attack vectors, tools, and major campaigns remains limited in publicly documented sources from CISA, FBI, and major security research organizations. The group has been linked to 74 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on December 11, 2022; most recent post September 22, 2023. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

March 28, 2023MICROFINANCE INSTITUTION listed by Karakurton the group's public leak site

Data size: 4 TB
Records: 861.839 SSNs

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Financial Services sector, which has 516 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, MICROFINANCE INSTITUTION is reported in United States, a country with 7,392 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

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.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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MICROFINANCE INSTITUTION

Claimed by Karakurt · listed 3 years ago

4 TB

Data size

861.839 SSNs records

38m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

Listed
Mar 28, 2023
Data leaked

At a glance

Group: Karakurt
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Financial Services
Listed on leak site: Mar 28, 2023
Data size: 4 TB
Records: 861.839 SSNs

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

The victim is a US-based microfinance institution operating in the financial services sector. It maintains large-scale loan portfolios and client databases, suggesting it serves millions of individual borrowers. No public site was available to confirm a specific legal name or headquarters address.

Industry: Microfinance & Consumer Lending

Attack summary

Severity: critical — Confirmed exfiltration of nearly 2.9 million SSNs alongside a ~3 million-record PII and loan database constitutes a massive breach of highly regulated financial and personally identifiable data, meeting the threshold for critical severity under GLBA and potentially FCRA obligations.

Karakurt claims to have exfiltrated 4 TB of data from the institution with no mention of encryption; stolen data includes approximately 2,861,839 SSNs, a ~3 million-record loan and debtor database, finance and accounting data, legal data, CRM backups, and fully dumped VIP user mailboxes.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Social Security Numbers (2,861,839)
Loan status records (~3 million records)
Debtor personal information (names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses)
Debtor characteristic/profile data
Financial records
Client data
Accounting data
Legal data
CRM backups
VIP user mailbox dumps

What the group claims

We're happy to present you a brilliant 4TB stolen from a microfinance institution. We have 2,861,839 SSNs in total. Beside this, we hold other high value databases - for example, a gigantic database with 3 million lines, which contains information about the status of the loan, addresses, last names, phone numbers, mails, and even the characteristics of the debtor - very entertaining reading.Moreover, we have finance, clients data, accounting data, legal data, CRM backups, fully dumped VIP users mailboxes and more.You will definitely enjoy it!

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.