Was Museum für Naturkunde hit by ransomware?

Museum für Naturkunde was listed by the Snatch ransomware operation (Germany), 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 Snatch ransomware group?

Snatch 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 Museum für Naturkunde breach?

Snatch published data attributed to Museum für Naturkunde. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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Museum für Naturkunde

Claimed by Snatch · listed 3 years ago

30m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedNov 29, 2023
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Snatch
Status: Data leaked
Country: Germany
Sector: Education
Listed on leak site: Nov 29, 2023

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (Natural History Museum Berlin) is a publicly funded natural history museum and research institution located in Berlin, Germany. It holds one of the world's largest natural history collections, assembled over more than two centuries, and conducts scientific research across palaeontology, zoology, mineralogy, and related fields. The museum is affiliated with Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.

Industry: Natural History Museum & Scientific Research
Address: Invalidenstraße 43, 10115 Berlin, Germany
Employees: 201-500
Founded: 1810

Attack summary

Severity: high — Data has been published by the threat actor against a publicly funded scientific and cultural institution, indicating confirmed exfiltration. The institution handles research data, staff PII, and sensitive administrative records; publication of such data from a heritage/government-affiliated body constitutes significant harm even absent explicit volume figures.

The Snatch ransomware group claims to have attacked Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and has published data (disclosed status: data_published), though the leak post excerpt provides no specific details on the volume of data exfiltrated or whether systems were also encrypted.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Internal institutional documents
Research data
Staff/personnel records
Administrative files

What the group claims

The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin has a long and eventful history - it has seen days of glory and survived crises. The collections that were brought together over more than two centuries from all over the world created a treasure trove of knowledge.

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 Snatch

Snatch is a ransomware group that emerged in November 2021, operating with primarily financial motivations and targeting organizations across multiple sectors including business services, government, education, manufacturing, and healthcare. The group has compromised at least 142 known victims, with their attacks concentrated primarily in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, India, and France. Little is publicly documented about Snatch's specific country of origin or affiliations with other cybercriminal organizations, though their operational patterns suggest they function as an independent ransomware operation. The group's attack methodology and specific technical details regarding initial access vectors, encryption methods, and data exfiltration practices have not been extensively documented in public threat intelligence reports from major security firms or government agencies. While Snatch has maintained a notable victim count across diverse geographic regions and industry sectors, there are no widely reported major campaigns or high-profile attacks that have drawn significant public attention or law enforcement action. Based on available public information, Snatch appears to remain an active ransomware operation as of recent reporting periods, though comprehensive details about their current operational status and recent activities are limited in open-source intelligence. The group has been linked to 142 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on November 29, 2021; most recent post May 16, 2024. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

November 29, 2023Museum für Naturkunde listed by Snatchon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Snatch

Snatch has been linked to 142 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Snatch 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, Museum für Naturkunde is reported in Germany, a country with 926 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Snatch means Museum für Naturkunde 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 Snatch'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.