Disclosure context

About Vicesociety

Vicesociety is a ransomware group that emerged in May 2021, primarily motivated by financial gain through targeting critical infrastructure and public service organizations. The group's origin and specific affiliations remain largely undetermined by public threat intelligence reporting, though their operational patterns suggest they function as an independent ransomware operation rather than a established RaaS model. Vicesociety primarily gains initial access through exploitation of public-facing applications and credential-based attacks, with documented cases showing they particularly focus on compromising remote access services and vulnerable web applications before deploying their ransomware payload across victim networks. The group has demonstrated a clear preference for targeting educational institutions, government agencies, and healthcare organizations, with their 188 documented victims concentrated heavily in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Spain, indicating a focus on English-speaking and Western European entities. While specific high-profile campaigns have not been extensively detailed in major public threat intelligence reports from CISA or FBI advisories, the group's consistent targeting of critical sectors like education and healthcare has drawn attention from security researchers monitoring threats to essential services. Vicesociety remains active as of recent threat intelligence assessments, continuing their operations against similar target sectors with no documented law enforcement disruption or significant operational changes. The group has been linked to 188 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on May 31, 2021; most recent post June 20, 2023. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

March 11, 2023Berkeley County Schools listed by Vicesocietyon the group's public leak site

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Government sector, which has 509 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Berkeley County Schools is reported in United States, a country with 7,392 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

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.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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Berkeley County Schools

Claimed by Vicesociety · listed 3 years ago

38m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

Listed
Mar 11, 2023
Data leaked

At a glance

Group: Vicesociety
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Government
Listed on leak site: Mar 11, 2023

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Berkeley County Schools is the public school district serving Berkeley County, West Virginia. It oversees operations across 29 schools — including elementary, intermediate, middle, and high schools — and serves over 19,722 students. It is one of the larger public school districts in West Virginia.

Industry: K-12 Public Education
Address: 304 Hedgesville Road, Martinsburg, WV 25401, United States
Employees: 1001-5000

Attack summary

Severity: critical — The victim is a K-12 public school district with over 19,700 students; exfiltrated and published data almost certainly includes PII of minors (a protected class under FERPA and COPPA), as well as staff records, making this a critical-severity disclosure of regulated sensitive data at scale.

Vice Society claims to have exfiltrated data from Berkeley County Schools, with the disclosure status marked as data_published, indicating stolen data has been released. No ransom amount was stated and no specific data volume was disclosed in the post.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Student records
Staff personnel files
Administrative documents
Potentially identifiable information for minors

What the group claims

Berkeley County Public Schools oversees all operations of the public schools in the county of Berkeley, West Virginia. They serve over 19 722 students at 29 elementary, intermediate, middle and high schools.

Sources

Source

Indexed 3 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.