Was chicagobotanic hit by ransomware?

chicagobotanic was listed by the devman 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 devman ransomware group?

devman 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 chicagobotanic breach?

devman published data attributed to chicagobotanic. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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Chicago Botanic Garden

listed as chicagobotanic · Claimed by Devman · listed 10 months ago

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedSep 29, 2025
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Devman
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Education
Listed on leak site: Sep 29, 2025

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

The Chicago Botanic Garden is a public garden and nonprofit institution located in Glencoe, Illinois, operated by the Chicago Horticultural Society. It offers horticultural education, plant science research, urban agriculture programs (Windy City Harvest), and conservation science through its Negaunee Institute. The garden serves hundreds of thousands of visitors annually and runs extensive adult, youth, and professional learning programs.

Industry: Botanical Garden & Horticultural Education
Address: 1000 Lake Cook Road, Glencoe, IL 60022, United States
Employees: 201-500
Founded: 1972

Attack summary

Severity: high — Data is marked as published (data_published), indicating confirmed exfiltration and public release. The organization handles donor PII, membership records, employee data, and potentially payment/financial information at scale, constituting significant sensitive data exposure.

The group 'devman' claims to have attacked Chicago Botanic Garden and published data (disclosed status: data_published), demanding a ransom of $590,000 USD. No specific data volume or file count is described in the available leak post excerpt.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Internal organizational files
Employee records
Donor and membership data
Financial records
Educational program data

What the group claims

Ransom: 590000 USD

Sources

Victim sitewww.chicagobotanic.org
Leak posthttp://devmanblggk7ddrtqj3tsocnayow3bwnozab2s4yhv4shpv6ueitjzid.onion#wwwchicagobotanicorg

Source

Indexed 10 months 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 devman

The devman ransomware group is a recently emerged threat actor that began operations in April 2025, demonstrating a financially motivated criminal enterprise with a focus on opportunistic targeting across multiple sectors and geographic regions. Given the group's recent emergence and limited public documentation, specific details regarding their country of origin, organizational structure, or potential affiliations with established ransomware-as-a-service operations remain unknown to major cybersecurity agencies and researchers. The group's attack methodology and technical capabilities have not been thoroughly documented by reputable security firms, though their targeting patterns suggest a broad opportunistic approach rather than highly specialized tactics. In the brief period since their emergence, devman has reportedly compromised 184 victims across diverse sectors including technology, healthcare, public sector organizations, and agriculture and food production, with primary targeting concentrated in the United States, France, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Taiwan, and Thailand, though the inclusion of Svalbard and Jan Mayen in their targeting list may indicate data collection anomalies rather than actual operational focus on this remote Arctic territory. As of current reporting, devman appears to remain an active threat, though the lack of detailed technical analysis or law enforcement advisories suggests they may be operating at a relatively low profile compared to more established ransomware groups. The group has been linked to 184 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on April 6, 2025; most recent post February 4, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

September 29, 2025chicagobotanic listed by devmanon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by devman

devman has been linked to 184 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full devman 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, chicagobotanic is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by devman means chicagobotanic 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 devman'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.