**Nitrogen** is an emerging ransomware group that first appeared in September 2024, operating with apparent financial motivations through targeted extortion campaigns primarily focused on North American and European organizations. The group has claimed responsibility for attacks against 46 documented victims across multiple sectors, with manufacturing companies representing their most frequent targets. Limited public information suggests the group operates independently rather than as a Ransomware-as-a-Service model, though their specific country of origin and potential affiliations with other cybercriminal organizations remain undetermined by major security research firms. Their attack methodology appears to focus on opportunistic targeting across diverse industries including manufacturing, business services, technology, and hospitality sectors, with the United States serving as their primary area of operations followed by significant activity in Canada, Portugal, India, and France. Due to the group's recent emergence and relatively low profile compared to established ransomware families, detailed technical analysis of their encryption methods, data exfiltration practices, and initial access vectors has not been extensively documented by major threat intelligence providers such as CISA, FBI, or Mandiant. Given the group's recent formation in September 2024, no major high-profile campaigns or significant law enforcement actions have been publicly reported, with their victim portfolio consisting primarily of small to medium-sized enterprises rather than critical infrastructure or Fortune 500 companies. Nitrogen appears to remain active as of current reporting, though their limited operational history and relatively small victim count suggest they are still establishing their presence within the broader ransomware ecosystem. The group has been linked to 57 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on September 30, 2024; most recent post June 3, 2026. The operation is currently active.
Sector and geography
This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Energy sector, which has 652 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Stadtwerke Schwerte GmbH is reported in Germany, a country with 926 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by Nitrogen means Stadtwerke Schwerte GmbH 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 Nitrogen'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.
