**Overview**: Malas is a ransomware group that emerged in April 2023, operating with primarily financial motivations and targeting organizations across multiple sectors and geographic regions. The group has demonstrated significant activity levels, compromising approximately 170 victims within its first operational period.
**Origin & Affiliation**: Public documentation regarding Malas' specific country of origin and operational structure remains limited in available CISA, FBI, and security researcher reports. The group's targeting patterns across both Western nations and Russia suggest either independent operations or a complex operational structure that crosses traditional geopolitical boundaries.
**Attack Methodology**: Detailed technical analysis of Malas' specific attack vectors, tools, and encryption methods has not been extensively documented in publicly available threat intelligence reports from major security organizations. Based on victim distribution patterns, the group appears to employ effective initial access techniques that enable them to successfully compromise diverse organizational targets across multiple countries and industry sectors.
**Notable Campaigns**: While Malas has accumulated a substantial victim count of 170 organizations, specific high-profile attacks or record ransom demands have not been prominently featured in public security advisories or law enforcement communications. The group's targeting of media, technology, manufacturing, and transportation sectors across Italy, Russia, Germany, France, and the United States indicates a broad operational scope.
**Current Status**: Given the limited public documentation available from authoritative sources, the current operational status of Malas remains unclear based on verified threat intelligence reporting. The group has been linked to 170 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on April 9, 2023; most recent post May 18, 2023. The operation is currently inactive.
Sector and geography
This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Technology sector, which has 2,524 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Etanova is reported in Turkey, a country with 7 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.
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.
