Dharma is a ransomware family that first emerged in December 2016, operating primarily as a financially motivated cybercriminal enterprise that has targeted organizations across multiple sectors through opportunistic attacks. The group's origins and specific affiliations remain largely undocumented in major threat intelligence reports, though their operational patterns suggest they function as independent actors rather than a formal ransomware-as-a-service operation. Dharma operators typically gain initial access through brute force attacks against Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) services and exploit weak or default credentials, subsequently deploying their ransomware payload that encrypts files and appends distinctive extensions to affected systems. Based on available data, the group has conducted limited documented campaigns with only two confirmed victims, primarily targeting critical manufacturing and government facilities in the United States and Ukraine, suggesting a preference for high-value infrastructure targets. Current intelligence indicates minimal recent activity from Dharma operators, with the group appearing to maintain low-profile operations or potentially having reduced their operational tempo since their initial emergence. The group has been linked to 2 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on December 5, 2016; most recent post June 1, 2020. The operation is currently inactive.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by dharma means Medservicegroup 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.
- Monitor for the data appearing on dharma'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.
