Skip to main content
Darkfield

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

ESMPU – Escola Superior do Ministério Público da União

listed as Higher School of the Public Ministry of the Union · Claimed by Vicesociety · listed 4 years ago

43m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedDec 20, 2022
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Vicesociety
Status
Data leaked
Country
Brazil
Sector
Education
Listed on leak site
Dec 20, 2022

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

The Escola Superior do Ministério Público da União (ESMPU) is a Brazilian federal institution responsible for the continuing education, professional development, and training of members and servants of the Public Prosecutor's Office of the Union (Ministério Público da União). It operates under the federal government of Brazil and serves prosecutors and staff across the country.

Industry
Government Legal Education & Training

Attack summary

Severity: critical — The victim is a federal government legal institution in Brazil whose staff and members include public prosecutors; any exfiltrated data is likely to contain sensitive PII, personnel records, and potentially legally privileged or law-enforcement-sensitive information. The data_published status confirms exfiltration has occurred, meeting the critical threshold for regulated/sensitive government data at scale.

Vice Society claims to have compromised ESMPU and published data (disclosed status: data_published), indicating exfiltration of internal data from the institution. The specific volume and categories of data published have not been detailed in the available leak post excerpt.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Internal institutional documents
  • Employee/staff records
  • Member (prosecutor) records
  • Administrative data

What the group claims

The mission of the ESMPU is to facilitate the continuous improvement of the members and servants of the Public Prosecutor's Office for an effective professional performance.

Source

Indexed 4 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.

Is this your supplier? Your competitor? You?

Pro plans monitor your domain, corporate emails, and crypto wallets across every new ransomware leak-site post, breach dump and Telegram callout — alerts within 5 minutes.

Disclosure context

About Vicesociety

Vicesociety is a ransomware group that emerged in May 2021, primarily motivated by financial gain through targeting critical infrastructure and public service organizations. The group's origin and specific affiliations remain largely undetermined by public threat intelligence reporting, though their operational patterns suggest they function as an independent ransomware operation rather than a established RaaS model. Vicesociety primarily gains initial access through exploitation of public-facing applications and credential-based attacks, with documented cases showing they particularly focus on compromising remote access services and vulnerable web applications before deploying their ransomware payload across victim networks. The group has demonstrated a clear preference for targeting educational institutions, government agencies, and healthcare organizations, with their 188 documented victims concentrated heavily in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Spain, indicating a focus on English-speaking and Western European entities. While specific high-profile campaigns have not been extensively detailed in major public threat intelligence reports from CISA or FBI advisories, the group's consistent targeting of critical sectors like education and healthcare has drawn attention from security researchers monitoring threats to essential services. Vicesociety remains active as of recent threat intelligence assessments, continuing their operations against similar target sectors with no documented law enforcement disruption or significant operational changes. The group has been linked to 188 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on May 31, 2021; most recent post June 20, 2023. The operation is currently inactive.

Also tracked as: VICE SOCIETY.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • December 20, 2022Higher School of the Public Ministry of the Union listed by Vicesocietyon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Vicesociety

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

See the full Vicesociety dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Education sector, which has 1,082 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Higher School of the Public Ministry of the Union is reported in Brazil, a country with 404 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Vicesociety means Higher School of the Public Ministry of the Union 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.br (Brazil), as required for your jurisdiction.
  • Monitor for the data appearing on Vicesociety'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.