Macaw is an obscure ransomware group that emerged in October 2021 with limited documented activity, appearing to be financially motivated based on typical ransomware operations. The group's country of origin and potential affiliations with other threat actors remain unknown due to insufficient public reporting from major security firms and law enforcement agencies. With only one documented victim, the group's attack methodology, initial access vectors, and technical capabilities have not been comprehensively analyzed or reported by reputable threat intelligence sources, though their targeting of the communications sector in the United States suggests potential focus on critical infrastructure. No notable high-profile campaigns or significant ransoms have been publicly documented for this group, and there are no recorded law enforcement actions targeting Macaw operations. The current operational status of Macaw remains unclear due to the lack of recent public reporting on their activities since their initial observation in late 2021. The group has been linked to 1 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on October 16, 2021. The operation is currently inactive.
Sector and geography
This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Communication sector, which has 26 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Sinclair Broadcast Group is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by macaw means Sinclair Broadcast Group 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, CISA (United States), as required for your jurisdiction.
- Monitor for the data appearing on macaw'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.
