Was Elara Engineering hit by ransomware?

Elara Engineering was listed by the Dragonforce ransomware operation (United States), 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 Dragonforce ransomware group?

Dragonforce 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 Elara Engineering breach?

Dragonforce published data attributed to Elara Engineering. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

Elara Engineering

Claimed by Dragonforce · listed 2 months ago

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedApr 1, 2026
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Dragonforce
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Construction
Listed on leak site: Apr 1, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Elara Engineering is a full-service Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, Fire Protection, and Technology (MEPFPT) consulting engineering firm based in Chicago, Illinois. The firm specializes in the development, costing, delivery, and construction oversight of building and utility systems design solutions, including pre-design and post-construction services. The company is celebrating its 25th anniversary, indicating it was founded circa 1999-2000, and serves markets including higher education, residential high-rise, municipal, and laboratory sectors.

Industry: MEP Consulting Engineering
Address: 525 W Hawthorne Place, Chicago, IL (inferred from public site context)
Founded: 1999

Attack summary

Severity: high — Data has been confirmed published by the ransomware group, indicating actual exfiltration rather than a mere listing. As a consulting engineering firm handling building systems for universities, municipal, and high-rise residential clients, the data likely includes sensitive business, client, and contractual information at meaningful scale.

DragonForce claims to have exfiltrated data from Elara Engineering and has published the data (disclosed status: data_published). The specific categories of data at risk are not itemized in the truncated post, but the group's typical disclosures include corporate, financial, HR, and contract documents.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Corporate correspondence
Financial documents
HR documents
Engineering project files
Client data

What the group claims

Elara Engineering is a full-service Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, Fire Protection, and Technology consulting engineering firm based in Chicago, Illinois. With 25 years of experience, the company specializes in the design, costing, delivery, and oversight of building and utility systems, offering both pre-design and post-construction services. Their clients include educational institutions, municipal entities, and residential developers, focusing on sustainable and innovative engineering solutions. Elara Engineering is committed to reducing energy consumption and carbon footprints through its projects and embraces diversity within its workforce

The leak post

captured from the group's site

```
{"data":{"count":483,"publications":[{"uuid":"b008b8b7-0e47-416f-adcd-2313d8136de4","created_at":"2026-05-08T20:56:13.122134Z","name":"CF Evans Construction","website":"www.cfevans.com","address":"125 Regional Pkwy Ste 200, Orangeburg, South Carolina, 29118, United States","description":"A recognized leader in the multi-family housing construction industry, CF Evans Construction provides a product for developers. The company has thrived amid six decades.\nThe data of this company includes:\n    Corporate correspondence of senior executives\n    Financial documents\n    HR documents\n    Accounting documents\n    Certificates, contracts, passwords, databases, and much more.","weight":4775795351552,"is_timer_publication_stopped":false,"timer_publication":"2026-05-22T07:48:00Z","try_again":false,"tags":[],"logo_uuid":"f4e582dd-6562-4590-bac8-2b9e5c564853","is_transfering":false},{"uuid":"3827192f-9bb3-490c-9c1c-d28b382510cd","created_at":"2026-05-08T17:53:24.736605Z","name":"CMC Expertise Comptable","website":"cmcexpertise.fr","address":"32 Rue De La Clairière, Fort-de-France,","description":"CMC Expertise Comptable is a certified accounting firm located in Martinique, dedicated t…

Sources

Source

Indexed 2 months 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 Dragonforce

Dragonforce is a relatively new ransomware group that emerged in December 2023, operating with apparent financial motivations based on their targeting patterns and victim selection. The group's origin and potential affiliations remain unclear due to limited public documentation from established threat intelligence sources, though their rapid accumulation of 439 documented victims suggests either sophisticated capabilities or possible connections to existing ransomware infrastructure. Based on their targeting patterns across diverse sectors including manufacturing, business services, technology, and construction, Dragonforce appears to employ opportunistic attack methodologies, though specific initial access vectors, encryption methods, and extortion tactics have not been publicly detailed by major security firms or law enforcement agencies. The group has demonstrated a preference for targeting organizations primarily in English-speaking countries and Western Europe, with the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Italy representing their most frequent victim locations, suggesting possible language capabilities or geographic operational preferences. As of current reporting, Dragonforce appears to remain active given their recent emergence and ongoing victim acquisition, though the lack of detailed public analysis from major threat intelligence organizations indicates either operational security measures that have limited researcher visibility or that the group has not yet conducted sufficiently high-profile attacks to warrant extensive public documentation by CISA, FBI, or established security research firms. The group has been linked to 596 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on December 13, 2023; most recent post June 12, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

April 1, 2026Elara Engineering listed by Dragonforceon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Dragonforce

Dragonforce has been linked to 596 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Dragonforce dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Construction sector, which has 415 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Elara Engineering is reported in United States, a country with 2,714 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Dragonforce means Elara Engineering 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 Dragonforce'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.