Scarab is a ransomware group that emerged in May 2016 with primarily financial motivations, operating as a relatively small-scale threat actor with documented attacks against critical infrastructure and public sector organizations. The group's origin and affiliations remain largely undocumented in public threat intelligence reporting, though their targeting patterns suggest independent operations rather than a ransomware-as-a-service model. Scarab's attack methodology and technical capabilities have received limited analysis in publicly available security research, though their consistent targeting of government facilities, emergency services, and educational institutions indicates a focus on high-impact public sector victims that may yield significant disruption leverage. The group has maintained a low profile compared to major ransomware operations, with only four documented victims primarily concentrated in the United States across critical sectors including government facilities, emergency services, and educational institutions. Current intelligence on Scarab's operational status remains limited, with no recent public reporting from major cybersecurity firms or law enforcement agencies indicating whether the group remains active or has ceased operations. The group has been linked to 4 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on May 18, 2016; most recent post June 1, 2018. 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, Pasquotank County is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by scarab means Pasquotank County 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 scarab'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.
