Was Empower Group hit by ransomware?

Empower Group was listed by the Dragonforce ransomware operation (Philippines), 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 Dragonforce ransomware group?

Dragonforce 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 Empower Group breach?

Dragonforce published data attributed to Empower Group. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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Empower Group

Claimed by Dragonforce · listed 2 months ago

58d

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedApr 16, 2026
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Dragonforce
Status: Data leaked
Country: Philippines
Sector: Business Services
Listed on leak site: Apr 16, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Empower Group is a small business financing broker based in Long Island City, New York, that connects business owners with funding products including SBA loans, business lines of credit, merchant cash advances, factoring, and term loans. The company leverages partnerships with over 40 private finance institutions to match clients with working capital solutions. It describes itself as having approximately a decade of experience in the alternative lending space.

Industry: Small Business Lending & Alternative Finance
Address: 37-18 Northern Blvd, Room 409, Long Island City, NY 11101

Attack summary

Severity: critical — Empower Group handles sensitive financial and personal data for small business borrowers, including loan applications, financial statements, and likely PII at scale. Data publication by DragonForce means regulated financial data has been confirmed exfiltrated and released publicly, meeting the critical threshold for PII and financial data exposure.

DragonForce claims to have published data belonging to Empower Group, with the disclosure status recorded as data_published, indicating exfiltration and public release of company data rather than encryption alone.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Client financial records
Business loan applications
Personal financial information of borrowers
Corporate correspondence
Accounting documents
Contracts and agreements

What the group claims

Empower Group has positioned itself in this space as a hub for it's clients to access these different types of funding products. Empower Group has leveraged partnerships with the top lenders in the space to better service Empower Group's client's specific needs. Through Empower Group's relationships, with access to more than 40 private finance institutions, Empower Group prides ourselves at being able to meet Empower Group's clients right where they are to service their specific needs for working capital. Empower Group is committed to continually growing and evolving with the industry as a service to Empower Group's partners; both business owners and lenders alike.

The leak post

captured from the group's site

```
{"data":{"count":483,"publications":[{"uuid":"b008b8b7-0e47-416f-adcd-2313d8136de4","created_at":"2026-05-08T20:56:13.122134Z","name":"CF Evans Construction","website":"www.cfevans.com","address":"125 Regional Pkwy Ste 200, Orangeburg, South Carolina, 29118, United States","description":"A recognized leader in the multi-family housing construction industry, CF Evans Construction provides a product for developers. The company has thrived amid six decades.\nThe data of this company includes:\n    Corporate correspondence of senior executives\n    Financial documents\n    HR documents\n    Accounting documents\n    Certificates, contracts, passwords, databases, and much more.","weight":4775795351552,"is_timer_publication_stopped":false,"timer_publication":"2026-05-22T07:48:00Z","try_again":false,"tags":[],"logo_uuid":"f4e582dd-6562-4590-bac8-2b9e5c564853","is_transfering":false},{"uuid":"3827192f-9bb3-490c-9c1c-d28b382510cd","created_at":"2026-05-08T17:53:24.736605Z","name":"CMC Expertise Comptable","website":"cmcexpertise.fr","address":"32 Rue De La Clairière, Fort-de-France,","description":"CMC Expertise Comptable is a certified accounting firm located in Martinique, dedicated t…

Sources

Source

Indexed 2 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 Dragonforce

Dragonforce is a relatively new ransomware group that emerged in December 2023, operating with apparent financial motivations based on their targeting patterns and victim selection. The group's origin and potential affiliations remain unclear due to limited public documentation from established threat intelligence sources, though their rapid accumulation of 439 documented victims suggests either sophisticated capabilities or possible connections to existing ransomware infrastructure. Based on their targeting patterns across diverse sectors including manufacturing, business services, technology, and construction, Dragonforce appears to employ opportunistic attack methodologies, though specific initial access vectors, encryption methods, and extortion tactics have not been publicly detailed by major security firms or law enforcement agencies. The group has demonstrated a preference for targeting organizations primarily in English-speaking countries and Western Europe, with the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Italy representing their most frequent victim locations, suggesting possible language capabilities or geographic operational preferences. As of current reporting, Dragonforce appears to remain active given their recent emergence and ongoing victim acquisition, though the lack of detailed public analysis from major threat intelligence organizations indicates either operational security measures that have limited researcher visibility or that the group has not yet conducted sufficiently high-profile attacks to warrant extensive public documentation by CISA, FBI, or established security research firms. The group has been linked to 596 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on December 13, 2023; most recent post June 12, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

April 16, 2026Empower Group listed by Dragonforceon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Dragonforce

Dragonforce has been linked to 596 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Dragonforce dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Business Services sector, which has 2,643 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Empower Group is reported in Philippines, a country with 6 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Dragonforce means Empower Group 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 Dragonforce'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.