Was CVO Antwerpen hit by ransomware?

CVO Antwerpen was listed by the Metaencryptor ransomware operation (Belgium), 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 Metaencryptor ransomware group?

Metaencryptor 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 CVO Antwerpen breach?

Metaencryptor published data attributed to CVO Antwerpen. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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CVO Antwerpen

Claimed by Metaencryptor · listed 3 years ago

$72M

Ransom

demanded

35m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedAug 16, 2023
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Metaencryptor
Status: Data leaked
Country: Belgium
Sector: Education
Listed on leak site: Aug 16, 2023
Ransom demanded: $72M
Estimated revenue: $72M

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

GO! CVO Antwerpen is a Belgian public adult-education centre (Centrum voor Volwassenenonderwijs) operating under the GO! network in the Antwerp region. It offers more than 60 accredited programmes — including ICT, administration, languages, healthcare, and trades — across multiple campuses in day, evening, and distance formats. It issues officially recognised diplomas and certificates to adult learners.

Industry: Adult & Continuing Education
Address: Ruggeveldlaan 471, Antwerp, Belgium (GO! campus Ruggeveld); Distelvinklaan 22, Hoboken, Antwerp, Belgium (GO! campus Hoboken)

Attack summary

Severity: high — Data has been confirmed published by the threat actor, meaning exfiltration and public disclosure have occurred. An educational institution holds PII on adult students (names, contact details, possibly financial-aid and health/social information), making the exposure significant even without an explicit data-volume count.

Metaencryptor claims to have compromised GO! CVO Antwerpen and has published data (disclosed status: data_published); the leak post cites a figure of $72 M, which appears to be misrepresented as revenue rather than a ransom demand. No explicit data-volume figure was stated, but the data_published status indicates exfiltration and public release of victim data.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Student personal records
Staff/employee data
Administrative documents
Enrollment and course data

What the group claims

Education for adults.Revenue: $72M

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 Metaencryptor

Metaencryptor is a relatively new ransomware group that emerged in August 2023, operating with primarily financial motivations and targeting organizations across multiple sectors and geographical regions. The group appears to be an independent operation rather than a Ransomware-as-a-Service model, though limited public documentation makes definitive attribution challenging regarding their specific country of origin or connections to established cybercriminal networks. Based on their targeting patterns, Metaencryptor demonstrates a preference for manufacturing organizations, business services, and transportation/logistics companies, with their operations concentrated primarily in Western nations including Germany, the United States, Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom. With 31 documented victims since their emergence, the group represents a moderate but persistent threat in the ransomware landscape. However, due to their recent emergence and relatively lower profile compared to major ransomware families, comprehensive technical analysis of their attack methodologies, encryption techniques, and specific initial access vectors has not been extensively documented by major cybersecurity firms or government agencies. The group's current operational status remains active as of available intelligence, though the limited public reporting suggests they operate with a smaller scale and lower visibility than prominent ransomware-as-a-service operations that typically attract more attention from law enforcement and security researchers. The group has been linked to 31 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on August 16, 2023; most recent post June 24, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

August 16, 2023CVO Antwerpen listed by Metaencryptoron the group's public leak site

Ransom demanded: $72M

Other recent disclosures by Metaencryptor

Metaencryptor has been linked to 31 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Metaencryptor dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Education sector, which has 1,082 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, CVO Antwerpen is reported in Belgium, a country with 90 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Metaencryptor means CVO Antwerpen 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.be (Belgium), as required for your jurisdiction.
Monitor for the data appearing on Metaencryptor'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.