Skip to main content
Darkfield

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

VERTEL

Claimed by Spacebears · listed 1 year ago

13m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedJun 17, 2025
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Spacebears
Status
Data leaked
Country
Australia
Sector
Telecommunication
Listed on leak site
Jun 17, 2025

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Vertel is an Australian-owned telecommunications carrier and ICT managed services provider headquartered in Sydney with nationwide service delivery capability. Operating for over 50 years, the company specializes in wireless, hybrid fibre, and critical communications services, particularly for government and enterprise clients in rural and remote Australia, offering cloud services, SD-WAN, managed networks, and security services.

Industry
Telecommunications & ICT Managed Services
Address
Sydney, Australia

Attack summary

Severity: critical — Confirmed exfiltration of regulated/sensitive data including client personal information and financial documents from a critical communications infrastructure provider serving government and enterprise clients.

Spacebears claims to have exfiltrated databases, SQL files, client personal information, and financial documents from Vertel. The group has published data as proof of the breach.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • SQL databases
  • Client personal information
  • Financial documents

What the group claims

We have come from humble beginnings as an operator of communication sites and two-way radio networks. As one of Australia’s first true ‘managed services’ providers, we started our corporate life serving demanding government and enterprise organisations.Vertel is an Australian-owned and operated telecommunications carrier and ICT managed services provider with a vision to enable smarter, healthier and safer Australian communities through excellence in innovation, delivery and support of our services.Headquartered in Sydney with an Australia-wide service delivery capability, Vertel has supported Australian government and corporate sector clients for more than 50 years.Vertel was originally one of Australia’s market-leading managed radio services providers. We pivoted to become a market leader in the provision of high-capacity, highly reliable wireless and hybrid fibre telecommunications services (including, more recently, nbn) with a focus on meeting critical communications needs for customers, particularly in rural and remote Australia.Vertel’s service offerings provide a complementary range of network-centric managed services. These include cloud services (IaaS), software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and managed router services (MRS), managed networks (WAN and LAN), managed voice and security services.As network services experts with a focus on the end-to-end performance of customer services, Vertel excels in responsive 24x7 service and support for our growing base of customers whether in rural and remote regions or in metropolitan areas.As both a carrier and a managed services provider, we provide flexible, responsive and adaptable insights into critical networking and cloud services issues confronting businesses today.- Database, SQL- Personal information of  clients- Financial documents https://vertel.com.au/

Sources

Source

Indexed 1 year 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.

Is this your supplier? Your competitor? You?

Pro plans monitor your domain, corporate emails, and crypto wallets across every new ransomware leak-site post, breach dump and Telegram callout — alerts within 5 minutes.

Disclosure context

About Spacebears

Spacebears is a recently emerged ransomware group first observed in April 2024, operating with apparent financial motivations and demonstrating a broad targeting approach across multiple sectors and geographic regions. The group's origin and potential affiliations remain unclear due to limited public documentation from established threat intelligence sources, though their targeting pattern suggests a professional operation focused on maximizing financial returns rather than geopolitical objectives. With 117 known victims since their emergence, Spacebears has shown particular focus on organizations in the United States, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Canada, with their attacks primarily affecting technology, healthcare, manufacturing, and business services sectors, indicating they likely employ opportunistic targeting rather than sector-specific specialization. Their attack methodology, initial access vectors, and specific technical capabilities have not been extensively documented in public reporting from major cybersecurity firms or law enforcement agencies, limiting detailed analysis of their operational procedures and tools. Due to the group's recent emergence and limited public intelligence reporting, notable high-profile campaigns and specific victim details remain largely undocumented in established threat intelligence channels. The group's current operational status appears active given their recent emergence timeline, though comprehensive analysis is constrained by the lack of detailed public reporting from authoritative cybersecurity sources. The group has been linked to 185 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on April 29, 2024; most recent post July 13, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Also tracked as: space bears.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • June 17, 2025VERTEL listed by Spacebearson the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Spacebears

Spacebears has been linked to 185 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Spacebears dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Telecommunication sector, which has 172 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, VERTEL is reported in Australia, a country with 455 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Spacebears means VERTEL 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, ACSC (Australia), as required for your jurisdiction.
  • Monitor for the data appearing on Spacebears'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.