Was Lightcast hit by ransomware?

Lightcast was listed by the direwolf ransomware operation (United States), 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 direwolf ransomware group?

direwolf 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 Lightcast breach?

direwolf published data attributed to Lightcast. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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Lightcast

Claimed by Direwolf · listed 6 days ago

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedSep 7, 2026
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Direwolf
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Professional Services
Listed on leak site: Sep 7, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Lightcast is a US-based labor market analytics company (formerly Emsi/Burning Glass) that provides job-postings, skills, and occupational data APIs, subscription-based analyst platforms, and consulting services to higher-education institutions, workforce development organizations, and public-sector agencies. The company aggregates data from job postings, professional profiles, and government statistics to deliver labor market intelligence covering 165 countries.

Industry: Labor Market Analytics & Workforce Intelligence
Founded: 2007

Attack summary

Severity: critical — Confirmed exfiltration of large-scale PII (91k+ named analyst users with emails and organizations, 111k+ enriched profiles with contact details), customer account and financial records (revenue, ARR, contract data), internal staff credentials (bcrypt hashes, API keys), and Metabase application secrets. Data spans sensitive customer base including CUNY, Federal Reserve Board, and workforce agencies. No encryption is claimed; only exfiltration.

The direwolf group claims to have exfiltrated Lightcast's complete internal databases, including 5 PostgreSQL and SQLite database exports totaling ~2.3 GB with 3,013,658 rows spanning 2002–2026. The group asserts it has accessed sales/CRM data, product analytics, customer accounts, revenue records, internal employee information, customer user credentials, API authentication keys, and support conversations.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Customer accounts and sales pipeline (147k+ accounts, 107k+ opportunities)
Revenue and ARR records (710k+ annual recurring revenue entries, 2007–2030)
Analyst platform user accounts with names and emails (91k+ users, including @cuny.edu, @careersourcecf.com addresses)
Sales emails and communications (81k+ records, 2020–2022)
Intercom support conversations (25k+ chats with customer emails, 2020–2026)
API client registry (15k+ entries with client emails and OAuth scopes)
Metabase application database (staff accounts with bcrypt password hashes, API keys, encrypted secrets, database connection configs)
Internal employee data (ChatGPT usage costs, org chart, staff email addresses)
Snowflake data-share contracts and costs
Third-party enrichment data (111k+ profile records with email/phone, partially base64-encoded)
Sales force notes and call records (Gong call data)

What the group claims

Human Resources Software

The leak post

captured from the group's site

```
{"article":{"id":126,"title":"Lightcast","content":"\u003ch1\u003eData Warehouse Briefing\u003c/h1\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e1. Overview\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003ctable\u003e\n\u003cthead\u003e\n\u003ctr\u003e\n\u003cth\u003eItem\u003c/th\u003e\n\u003cth\u003eValue\u003c/th\u003e\n\u003c/tr\u003e\n\u003c/thead\u003e\n\u003ctbody\u003e\n\u003ctr\u003e\n\u003ctd\u003eBusiness\u003c/td\u003e\n\u003ctd\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLightcast\u003c/strong\u003e (US labor-market analytics company, formerly Emsi/Burning Glass: sells Analyst subscriptions, job-postings/skills/titles API products and consulting to higher-education \u0026amp; workforce organizations - CUNY Hostos, Center for Workforce Development, One Columbus, Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Federal Reserve Board; evidence: analyst users @hostos.cuny.edu, Snowflake share LIGHTCAST.US_PROFILES_PSEUDONYMIZED.PROFILES_SKILLS, emsiauth API clients w/ postings:us/hwol scopes, @lightcast.io staff emails)\u003c/td\u003e\n\u003c/tr\u003e\n\u003ctr\u003e\n\u003ctd\u003eTotal size\u003c/td\u003e\n\u003ctd\u003e~2.3 GB on disk, 90 JSONL table files, \u003cstrong\u003e5 database exports\u003c/strong\u003e, \u003cstrong\u003e3,013,6…

Sources

Victim sitelightcast.io
Leak posthttp://direwolfcdkv5whaz2spehizdg22jsuf5aeje4asmetpbt6ri4jnd4qd.onion/api/public/articles/126

Source

Indexed 6 days 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 direwolf

Direwolf is a ransomware group that emerged in May 2025 with primarily financial motivations, having targeted 71 known victims across multiple sectors and geographic regions. The group's origin and potential affiliations remain undocumented in public threat intelligence reports, with no confirmed information regarding whether they operate as a Ransomware-as-a-Service model or as an independent entity. Their attack methodology and technical capabilities have not been extensively documented by major cybersecurity firms or government agencies, though their targeting patterns indicate a focus on manufacturing, technology, healthcare, and transportation/logistics sectors across Malaysia, the United States, Thailand, Singapore, and Taiwan. No major high-profile campaigns or significant ransomware demands have been publicly attributed to this group by CISA, FBI, or established security researchers such as Mandiant. Given the group's recent emergence and limited public documentation, their current operational status and long-term threat posture remain unclear, requiring continued monitoring by the cybersecurity community to establish a more comprehensive threat profile. The group has been linked to 138 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on May 27, 2025; most recent post September 11, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Also tracked as: DIRE WOLF.

Timeline of this disclosure

September 7, 2026Lightcast listed by direwolf on the group's public leak site

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Professional Services sector, which has 17 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Lightcast is reported in United States, a country with 3,165 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by direwolf means Lightcast 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 direwolf'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.