Groove is a relatively minor ransomware operation that emerged in September 2021, primarily motivated by financial gain through extortion activities. The group's origin and affiliations remain largely undocumented in public threat intelligence reporting, with limited information available about their operational structure or potential ties to other cybercriminal organizations. Based on available data, Groove has demonstrated a focused targeting approach, with documented attacks against media sector organizations, though their specific attack methodologies, initial access vectors, and technical capabilities have not been extensively analyzed or reported by major security firms. The group's operational scale appears limited, with only 13 known victims documented in public reporting, suggesting either a smaller operation or one that has maintained a relatively low profile compared to major ransomware families. Groove's current operational status remains unclear due to the limited public documentation and intelligence reporting available about this particular threat actor. The group has been linked to 13 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on September 9, 2021; most recent post October 30, 2021. The operation is currently inactive.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by Groove means Я не пью виски но с ним бы выпил 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 Groove'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.
