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Hartwick College

listed as hartwick.edu · Claimed by Chort · listed 2 years ago

20m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedNov 17, 2024
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Chort
Status
Data leaked
Country
United States
Sector
Education
Listed on leak site
Nov 17, 2024

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Hartwick College is a private liberal arts college located in Oneonta, New York. Founded in 1797, it serves approximately 1,200 undergraduate students and offers a broad range of academic programs. The institution is a regional higher education provider in upstate New York.

Industry
Higher Education
Address
1 Hartwick Drive, Oneonta, NY 13820, United States
Employees
400-500
Founded
1797

Attack summary

Severity: high — Confirmed exfiltration of institutional databases and files from a higher education institution with access to student and staff personally identifiable information at scale. Educational institutions hold sensitive PII and are critical infrastructure providers.

The Chort ransomware group claims to have exfiltrated databases and files from Hartwick College. The group has published data and is awaiting a decision (likely regarding ransom negotiation or further disclosure).

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Institutional databases
  • Administrative files
  • Student records (inferred)
  • Staff/faculty records (inferred)
  • Financial records (inferred)

What the group claims

Status: Wait for Decision - details: Databases + Files of This Company

Sources

Source

Indexed 2 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 chort

Chort is a recently emerged ransomware group that first appeared in November 2024, operating with apparent financial motivations based on their targeting patterns across multiple sectors. Given the group's recent emergence and limited public documentation, their country of origin and potential affiliations remain unclear, though their targeting of US and Kuwaiti entities suggests a broader international operational scope rather than localized cybercriminal activity. The group's attack methodology details have not been extensively documented by major security firms, though their sector-specific targeting of education, agriculture and food production, technology, and government entities indicates a deliberate victim selection process rather than opportunistic attacks. With only seven known victims documented since their November 2024 emergence, Chort has maintained a relatively low profile compared to established ransomware operations, with no major high-profile incidents or law enforcement actions publicly reported by CISA, FBI, or prominent security researchers. The group remains active as of late 2024, though their limited victim count and recent emergence make it unclear whether they represent a nascent operation still developing their capabilities or a more selective targeting approach. The group has been linked to 7 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on November 17, 2024; most recent post November 22, 2024. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • November 17, 2024hartwick.edu listed by chorton the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by chort

chort has been linked to 7 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full chort 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, hartwick.edu is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by chort means hartwick.edu 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 chort'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.