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Ransomware victim disclosure

All victims

Farwick + Grote Architekten BDA Stadtplaner

listed as farwickgrote.de · Claimed by Cloak · listed 3 years ago

31m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedDec 1, 2023
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Cloak
Status
Data leaked
Country
Germany
Sector
Legal
Listed on leak site
Dec 1, 2023

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Farwick + Grote is a German architecture and urban planning firm (Architekten BDA Stadtplaner) based in Germany, operating primarily in the North Rhine-Westphalia region. The firm works on a broad range of public and private projects including schools, residential quarters, town halls, sports facilities, and urban development schemes across numerous German cities. Named partners include Heiner Farwick, Dagmar Grote, and several others.

Industry
Architecture & Urban Planning

Attack summary

Severity: medium — Data has been published by the threat actor, indicating confirmed exfiltration; however, no specific data volume or evidence of regulated/sensitive personal data at scale is described in the post, and the victim is an architectural firm rather than a critical infrastructure or highly regulated sector.

The Cloak ransomware group claims to have attacked Farwick + Grote and has published data (disclosed status: data_published), though no specific data volume, ransom demand, or detailed description of exfiltrated content was included in the leak post.

medium

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Project documentation
  • Internal business files
  • Partner and staff information

What the group claims

Country: germany

Sources

Source

Indexed 3 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 Cloak

Cloak is a relatively new ransomware group that emerged in August 2023, operating with primarily financial motivations and demonstrating a broad international targeting scope with 162 documented victims across multiple sectors. The group's origin and specific affiliations remain undocumented in public threat intelligence reporting, though their operational patterns suggest they may operate independently rather than as part of a larger ransomware-as-a-service ecosystem. Limited public documentation exists regarding their specific attack methodologies, encryption techniques, or data exfiltration practices, though their targeting patterns indicate sophisticated capabilities to compromise organizations across diverse sectors including business services, technology, healthcare, and manufacturing. The group has demonstrated a preference for targeting victims in English-speaking countries and Western Europe, with the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy representing their primary geographic focus areas. Cloak appears to remain active as of current reporting, though the relative scarcity of detailed public analysis from major threat intelligence firms suggests either operational security effectiveness or a lower profile compared to more established ransomware operations. The group has been linked to 166 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on August 24, 2023; most recent post June 18, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • December 1, 2023farwickgrote.de listed by Cloakon the group's public leak site

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Legal sector, which has 241 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, farwickgrote.de is reported in Germany, a country with 926 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Cloak means farwickgrote.de 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-Bund (Germany), as required for your jurisdiction.
  • Monitor for the data appearing on Cloak'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.