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Paterson & Cooke

listed as patersoncooke.com · Claimed by Blackbasta · listed 2 years ago

28m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedApr 9, 2024
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Blackbasta
Status
Data leaked
Country
South Africa
Sector
Business Services
Listed on leak site
Apr 9, 2024

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Paterson & Cooke is a specialized engineering consultancy founded in 1991, headquartered in Golden, Colorado, with global offices across Australia, Canada, Chile, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and USA. They provide expert consulting and design services in slurry pipeline systems, tailings and mine waste technology, mine backfill, offshore engineering, and mineral processing, primarily serving the mining industry.

Industry
Mining & Mineral Processing Engineering Consulting
Address
221 Corporate Circle, Suite D, Golden, CO 80401-5637, USA
Founded
1991

Attack summary

Severity: high — Confirmed exfiltration of large data volume (450GB+) including personal data and sensitive corporate/technical documentation from a specialized consulting firm. Data has been published, indicating no ransom negotiation. Scale and sensitivity of personal data elevates this beyond medium.

Black Basta claims to have exfiltrated approximately 450GB+ of corporate data from Paterson & Cooke, including corporate files, technical drawings, user personal data, and employee home directories. The group has published the data.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Corporate data
  • Engineering drawings
  • Personal data of users
  • Employee home folders and documents

What the group claims

Paterson & Cooke was founded as an engineering consultancy in 1991 by Angus Paterson and Robert Cooke specialising in slurry pipeline and mine backfilling consulting services to the South African mining industry. Through extensive early work with major South African mining companies, they gained invaluable knowledge and experience designing innovative and effective solutions for the challenges presented when backfilling some of the country’s deepest gold mines. More than three decades later, the founding vision of providing the most sought-after specialist consulting engineering services to the mining industry holds true, and our expertise has grown to include slurry pipeline systems, tailings and mine waste technology, mine backfill, offshore engineering, and mineral processing. Our reputation as global leaders in this industry is directly attributed to the work of our diverse team of world class engineers and specialists operating out of offices in Australia, Canada, Chile, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and USA. Six of these offices have comprehensive laboratory testing facilities.SITE: www.patersoncooke.com Address : 221 Corporate Circle, Suite D, Golden, CO 80401-5637, USAALL DATA SIZE: ~450gb+ 1. Corporate data 2. Drawings 3. Users personal data 4. Home users folders and docs & etc…

Sources

Source

Indexed 2 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 blackbasta

Black Basta is a highly sophisticated ransomware group that emerged in April 2022 and operates with a primary motivation of financial extortion, having rapidly established itself as one of the most prolific ransomware operations of the modern era with over 500 confirmed victims globally. The group is widely assessed by researchers including Mandiant and CISA to have likely ties to former members of the Conti ransomware syndicate following that group's dissolution in mid-2022, and operates as a private Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model with a closed affiliate structure rather than open recruitment, with suspected links to the FIN7 threat actor cluster based on observed tooling overlaps documented by SentinelOne and Microsoft. Black Basta employs a double extortion methodology, exfiltrating sensitive victim data prior to encryption and threatening publication on their Tor-based leak site "Basta News" to compound pressure on victims; initial access is predominantly achieved through phishing campaigns, purchase of stolen credentials, and exploitation of known vulnerabilities including QakBot malware distribution, with the group subsequently deploying tools such as Cobalt Strike, SystemBC, and their custom encryptor targeting both Windows and VMware ESXi environments using a ChaCha20 encryption algorithm. Per CISA and FBI joint advisory AA24-131A published in May 2024, the group has struck over 500 organizations across North America, Europe, and Australia, with high-profile victims including Ascension Health, Capita, the American Dental Association, and Rheinmetall, demonstrating a clear preference for manufacturing, business services, technology, transportation, and food production sectors across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Italy. As of the time of available public reporting, Black Basta remained operationally active, though internal chat logs leaked in early 2025 revealed significant internal tensions and potential organizational fragmentation that security researchers assessed could impact the group's near-term operational cohesion. The group has been linked to 523 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on April 26, 2022; most recent post January 11, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • April 9, 2024patersoncooke.com listed by blackbastaon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by blackbasta

blackbasta has been linked to 523 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full blackbasta dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Business Services sector, which has 3,796 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, patersoncooke.com is reported in South Africa, a country with 27 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by blackbasta means patersoncooke.com 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, ECS-CSIRT (South Africa), as required for your jurisdiction.
  • Monitor for the data appearing on blackbasta'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.