Was airexplore.aero Company hit by ransomware?

airexplore.aero Company was listed by the Babuk ransomware operation (Slovakia), 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 Babuk ransomware group?

Babuk 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 airexplore.aero Company breach?

Babuk published data attributed to airexplore.aero Company. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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airexplore.aero Company

Claimed by Babuk · listed 1 year ago

16m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedMar 11, 2025
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Babuk
Status: Data leaked
Country: Slovakia
Sector: Transportation/Logistics
Listed on leak site: Mar 11, 2025

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

AirExplore is an ACMI (Aircraft, Crew, Maintenance, and Insurance) provider based in Bratislava, Slovakia, operating a fleet of 12 Boeing 737-800 aircraft. Part of Avia Solutions Group, it specializes in passenger and cargo charter operations across Europe and globally, having carried over 10 million passengers since 2010.

Industry: Aviation & Aircraft Leasing (ACMI)
Address: Krajná 29, 821 04, Bratislava, Slovak Republic
Founded: 2010

Attack summary

Severity: low — Leak post is minimal with only company name listed; no proof files, data inventory, or operational impact details are disclosed. Insufficient evidence of successful exfiltration or encryption impact.

Babuk ransomware group claims to have attacked AirExplore and published data. No specific details on encryption, exfiltration method, or data types are provided in the leak post excerpt.

low

What the group claims

airexplore.aero Company

Sources

Victim siteairexplore.aero

Source

Indexed 1 year 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 Babuk

Babuk is a ransomware group that emerged in October 2020, operating primarily for financial gain through extortion campaigns targeting organizations across multiple sectors. The group is believed to have originated from Russian-speaking cybercriminal networks and operates independently rather than as a traditional Ransomware-as-a-Service model, though they have shown willingness to collaborate with affiliates. Babuk typically gains initial access through exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities in public-facing applications and weak remote desktop protocol credentials, employs double extortion tactics by exfiltrating sensitive data before deploying their custom encryption malware, and threatens to publish stolen information on their dedicated leak site if ransom demands are not met. The group gained significant notoriety in May 2021 when they successfully breached the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, stealing and threatening to release sensitive law enforcement data including information on criminal investigations and police personnel. Following increased law enforcement attention after the police department attack, Babuk announced in May 2021 that they were ceasing ransomware operations and would focus solely on data theft and extortion, though various security researchers have observed continued sporadic activity from the group or actors using similar tools and techniques. The group has been linked to 188 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on October 25, 2020; most recent post April 23, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

March 11, 2025airexplore.aero Company listed by Babukon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Babuk

Babuk has been linked to 188 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Babuk dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Transportation/Logistics sector, which has 1,081 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, airexplore.aero Company is reported in Slovakia, a country with 4 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Babuk means airexplore.aero Company 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 Babuk'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.