Disclosure context

About Karakurt

Karakurt is a ransomware group that emerged in December 2022, operating primarily as a data extortion threat actor with financial motivations rather than traditional file encryption. The group's origin and affiliations remain largely undocumented by major cybersecurity agencies, though their operational patterns suggest they function as an independent entity rather than a confirmed ransomware-as-a-service operation. Karakurt employs data theft and extortion tactics, focusing on exfiltrating sensitive information from victim networks before demanding payment under threat of public disclosure, representing a pure extortion model that bypasses traditional encryption-based ransomware approaches. The group has targeted 74 known victims across multiple sectors, with particular focus on healthcare, education, manufacturing, energy, and professional services organizations, primarily affecting entities in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, and India. Based on available reporting from established cybersecurity agencies and researchers, Karakurt appears to remain active as of recent assessments, though comprehensive intelligence on their specific attack vectors, tools, and major campaigns remains limited in publicly documented sources from CISA, FBI, and major security research organizations. The group has been linked to 74 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on December 11, 2022; most recent post September 22, 2023. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

June 28, 2023CentroMed listed by Karakurton the group's public leak site

Data size: 25 GB

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Healthcare sector, which has 1,779 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, CentroMed 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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El Centro del Barrio (CentroMed)

listed as CentroMed · Claimed by Karakurt · listed 3 years ago

25 GB

Data size

35m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

Listed
Jun 28, 2023
Data leaked

At a glance

Group: Karakurt
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Healthcare
Listed on leak site: Jun 28, 2023
Data size: 25 GB

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

El Centro del Barrio, doing business as CentroMed since 2001, is a federally qualified community health center founded in 1971 and based in San Antonio, Texas. It provides a broad range of primary and preventive healthcare services including pediatrics, women's health, family medicine, dental care, optometry, podiatry, pharmacy, and behavioral health. The organization serves a predominantly Hispanic community and receives HHS/HRSA funding with Federal Public Health Service deemed status.

Industry: Federally Qualified Health Center (Community Health / Primary Care)
Address: San Antonio, Texas, United States
Founded: 1971

Attack summary

Severity: critical — Confirmed exfiltration of regulated sensitive data at scale: thousands of SSNs combined with protected health information (PHI) from a healthcare provider constitutes a critical HIPAA-regulated breach affecting a vulnerable patient population.

Karakurt claims to have exfiltrated 25 GB of data from CentroMed, including several thousand Social Security Numbers, medical and health records, and accounting, financial, and human resources data; no encryption claim is made, consistent with Karakurt's exfiltration-only model.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Social Security Numbers (several thousand)
Medical and health records
Accounting and financial data
Human resources data

What the group claims

El Centro del Barrio (CDB), which started doing business as CentroMed in 2001, was founded in 1971 and ran one counseling program for children and adolescents. They lost 25 GB of their data, which contains several thousand ssns and other medical and health information. Accounting, financial, human resources data is also represented.

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.