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Pennsylvania State Education Association

Claimed by Rhysida · listed 2 years ago

22m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedSep 9, 2024
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Rhysida
Status
Data leaked
Country
United States
Sector
Government
Listed on leak site
Sep 9, 2024

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

The Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA) is a large professional organization and labor union representing 178,000 education professionals across Pennsylvania. It advocates for educators and their working conditions in the state's public schools.

Industry
Education & Labor Union
Employees
178000

Attack summary

Severity: high — Breach of a major education union affecting 178,000 members represents exposure of significant organizational and potentially personal data at scale. Union membership records typically contain sensitive employment and contact information.

Rhysida claims to have compromised PSEA and published data. The group has disclosed the breach but specific details about what data was exfiltrated or encrypted are not provided in the available post excerpt.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • member records
  • professional information

What the group claims

Pennsylvania State Education Association PSEA is 178,000 members strong a community of education professionals who make a difference in the lives of Pennsylvania's students every day.

Source

Indexed 2 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 Rhysida

Rhysida is a ransomware group that emerged in June 2023, operating with primarily financial motivations through targeted attacks against critical infrastructure and public sector organizations. The group's origin and potential state affiliations remain unclear, though they operate independently rather than as a traditional Ransomware-as-a-Service model, with limited public documentation regarding connections to other cybercriminal organizations. Rhysida employs double extortion tactics, typically gaining initial access through compromised VPN credentials and exploiting vulnerable public-facing applications before deploying their ransomware payload and exfiltrating sensitive data prior to encryption. The group has demonstrated a particular focus on healthcare and educational institutions, with notable attacks documented by CISA and FBI advisories highlighting their targeting of hospitals and school districts across multiple countries, resulting in significant operational disruptions to critical services. As of late 2024, Rhysida remains an active threat with continued operations targeting organizations primarily in the United States, Canada, and other Western nations, maintaining their focus on high-value sectors where operational disruption can maximize ransom payment likelihood. The group has been linked to 282 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on June 5, 2023; most recent post June 18, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • September 9, 2024Pennsylvania State Education Association listed by Rhysidaon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Rhysida

Rhysida has been linked to 282 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Rhysida dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Government sector, which has 685 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Pennsylvania State Education Association is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Rhysida means Pennsylvania State Education Association 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 Rhysida'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.