**Overview:** BianLian is a financially motivated ransomware group that emerged in July 2022, quickly establishing itself as a significant threat to organizations across multiple sectors. The group operates with a primary focus on extorting victims for financial gain through data encryption and exfiltration tactics.
**Origin & Affiliation:** While the exact country of origin remains unconfirmed by public reporting, BianLian appears to operate as an independent ransomware group rather than following a traditional Ransomware-as-a-Service model. Security researchers have not established definitive links between BianLian and other known ransomware families or cybercriminal organizations.
**Attack Methodology:** BianLian typically gains initial access through compromised Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) credentials and exploits of public-facing applications, according to security researchers. The group employs double extortion tactics, stealing sensitive data before encrypting victim systems, and threatens to publish exfiltrated information on their leak site if ransom demands are not met. Their operations demonstrate sophisticated understanding of network environments and data exfiltration techniques.
**Notable Campaigns:** Since its emergence, BianLian has successfully compromised over 670 organizations globally, with documented cases spanning critical infrastructure and major corporations across their primary target sectors. The group has been particularly active in targeting healthcare organizations, prompting attention from cybersecurity agencies due to the critical nature of these attacks.
**Current Status:** As of recent threat intelligence reporting, BianLian remains an active ransomware threat, continuing to target organizations primarily in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, India, and Australia. The group has been linked to 668 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on July 14, 2022; most recent post April 3, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.
Also tracked as: Hydra.
Sector and geography
This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Not Found sector, which has 4,859 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Saunders and Saunders 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.
