TeslaCrypt was a ransomware family that emerged in February 2016, primarily motivated by financial gain through encryption of victim files and ransom demands. The group operated independently rather than as a Ransomware-as-a-Service model, with limited public information available regarding their country of origin or affiliations to other cybercriminal organizations. Based on documented cases, TeslaCrypt primarily targeted government facilities in the United States, though their specific initial access vectors and technical methodologies remain poorly documented in public threat intelligence reporting. The ransomware family had a relatively limited operational scope with only two known documented victims according to available intelligence sources. TeslaCrypt ceased operations and is no longer considered an active threat, with the operators having released master decryption keys in 2016 before disappearing from the threat landscape. The group has been linked to 2 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on February 22, 2016; most recent post March 9, 2016. The operation is currently inactive.
Sector and geography
This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Government Facilities sector, which has 88 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, City of Plainfield, N.J. is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by teslacrypt means City of Plainfield, N.J. 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 teslacrypt'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.
