Skip to main content
Darkfield

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

rheinmetall.com (Rheinmetall Defence)

Claimed by Babuk · listed 1 year ago

15m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedApr 4, 2025
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Babuk
Status
Data leaked
Country
Germany
Sector
Manufacturing
Listed on leak site
Apr 4, 2025

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Rheinmetall AG is a publicly-listed integrated technology conglomerate and leading international systems house in the defence industry, headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany. The company develops security and defence technologies across land, air, naval, and digital domains, with ~10,400 employees across 289 locations and €391 billion in revenue (2025).

Industry
Defence & Security Technology Systems
Address
Rheinmetall Platz 1, 40476 Düsseldorf, Deutschland
Employees
10418

Attack summary

Severity: high — Rheinmetall is a major NATO-allied defence contractor with access to sensitive military and government technology. Any confirmed data exfiltration from this sector represents significant national security risk and would constitute regulated/sensitive business data of the highest order, even without explicit proof files shown in the truncated post.

Babuk claims to have attacked Rheinmetall Defence and published data. The leak post provides no detail on attack method (encryption vs. exfiltration only) or specific data categories compromised.

high

What the group claims

rheinmetall.com (Rheinmetall Defence)

Sources

Source

Indexed 1 year 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 Babuk

Babuk is a ransomware group that emerged in October 2020, operating primarily for financial gain through extortion campaigns targeting organizations across multiple sectors. The group is believed to have originated from Russian-speaking cybercriminal networks and operates independently rather than as a traditional Ransomware-as-a-Service model, though they have shown willingness to collaborate with affiliates. Babuk typically gains initial access through exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities in public-facing applications and weak remote desktop protocol credentials, employs double extortion tactics by exfiltrating sensitive data before deploying their custom encryption malware, and threatens to publish stolen information on their dedicated leak site if ransom demands are not met. The group gained significant notoriety in May 2021 when they successfully breached the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, stealing and threatening to release sensitive law enforcement data including information on criminal investigations and police personnel. Following increased law enforcement attention after the police department attack, Babuk announced in May 2021 that they were ceasing ransomware operations and would focus solely on data theft and extortion, though various security researchers have observed continued sporadic activity from the group or actors using similar tools and techniques. The group has been linked to 188 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on October 25, 2020; most recent post April 23, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • April 4, 2025rheinmetall.com (Rheinmetall Defence) listed by Babukon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Babuk

Babuk has been linked to 188 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Babuk dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Manufacturing sector, which has 3,681 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, rheinmetall.com (Rheinmetall Defence) is reported in Germany, a country with 926 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Babuk means rheinmetall.com (Rheinmetall Defence) 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 Babuk'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.