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A.P.E.R.S (Association Pour l'Entraide et la Réinsertion Sociale)

listed as APERS · Claimed by Ciphbit · listed 3 years ago

32m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedNov 3, 2023
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Ciphbit
Status
Data leaked
Country
France
Sector
Legal
Listed on leak site
Nov 3, 2023

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

A.P.E.R.S is a French 1901 law non-profit association accredited by the Ministry of Justice and authorised by the judicial courts of Aix-en-Provence (since 1980) and Tarascon (since 1997). It provides victim support, criminal mediation, and judicial mandate services across 97 municipalities in Bouches-du-Rhône, assisting more than 8,000 victims per year including 800 emergency cases. The association employs socio-judicial workers, social workers, victim receptionists, and clinical psychologists alongside volunteers.

Industry
Victim Support & Judicial Services (Non-Profit / Justice Sector)
Address
18 Avenue Laurent Vibert, 13090 Aix-en-Provence, France
Founded
1980

Attack summary

Severity: critical — The attack involves confirmed exfiltration and darknet publication of highly sensitive PII belonging to crime victims, including potentially vulnerable individuals (trauma victims, emergency cases, minors via administrateur ad hoc), as well as judicial and criminal proceeding records — a category of regulated, sensitive data affecting over 8,000 individuals per year. The association itself has publicly confirmed the breach and data publication.

The Ciphbit ransomware group claims to have both encrypted systems and exfiltrated personal data from A.P.E.R.S, subsequently publishing the stolen data on the darknet. The association itself has confirmed on its public website that a ransomware attack with personal data theft occurred and that the data was published on the darknet.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Personal data of crime victims
  • Victim support case records
  • Criminal mediation records
  • Judicial mandate files
  • Data of individuals involved in criminal proceedings
  • Psychological assessment records
  • Emergency victim intake data

What the group claims

A.P.E.R.S is a 1901 law association agreed with the Ministry of Justice and authorized by the judicial courts of Aix en Provence and Tarascon. It is developing geographically across the entire extent of these two jurisdictions for the victim support service and within the jurisdiction of the Aix-en-Provence TJ for the judicial activity service. The association is responsible for caring for victims in 97 municipalities that make up the 119 municipalities of Bouches-du-Rhône, or approximately more than 900,000 inhabitants. It began operating exclusively with volunteers for the execution of judicial mandates (judicial checks and personality investigations). The necessary professionalization of the workers subsequently led it to hire socio-judicial workers, social workers, victim receptionists and clinical psychologists. In 1991, the victim support service and the criminal mediation service were created. The A.P.E.R.S is authorized by the Ministry of Justice and operates within the jurisdiction of the judicial courts of Aix en Provence (since 1980) and Tarascon (since 1997). Helping victims is today one of the priorities of judicial policies. These now give victims a set of rights. The A.P.E.R.S victim assistance service supports all victims of criminal offenses, natural disasters, collective accidents or attacks and all victims of particularly traumatic violent situations.

Sources

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.

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Disclosure context

About Ciphbit

Ciphbit is a relatively new ransomware group that emerged in September 2023, operating with primarily financial motivations and demonstrating a focused targeting approach across Western nations. The group's origin and potential affiliations remain largely undocumented by major threat intelligence organizations, though their operational patterns suggest they operate as an independent entity rather than a established ransomware-as-a-service model. With limited public documentation from authoritative sources like CISA, FBI, or major security research firms, specific details regarding their attack methodology, initial access vectors, and encryption techniques have not been comprehensively analyzed or reported in open-source intelligence. The group has claimed responsibility for attacks against 36 documented victims, primarily concentrating their operations in the United States, Italy, France, Germany, and Portugal, with a notable preference for targeting business services, manufacturing, healthcare, and construction sectors. No major high-profile campaigns or significant law enforcement actions against Ciphbit have been publicly documented by authoritative sources as of current reporting. Based on available intelligence, Ciphbit appears to remain active as of late 2023, though their relatively recent emergence and limited public documentation make definitive status assessments challenging without additional confirmed reporting from established threat intelligence sources. The group has been linked to 36 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on September 14, 2023; most recent post February 10, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • November 3, 2023APERS listed by Ciphbiton the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Ciphbit

Ciphbit has been linked to 36 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Ciphbit dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Legal sector, which has 241 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, APERS is reported in France, a country with 612 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Ciphbit means APERS 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, CERT-FR (France), as required for your jurisdiction.
  • Monitor for the data appearing on Ciphbit'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.