Chort is a recently emerged ransomware group that first appeared in November 2024, operating with apparent financial motivations based on their targeting patterns across multiple sectors. Given the group's recent emergence and limited public documentation, their country of origin and potential affiliations remain unclear, though their targeting of US and Kuwaiti entities suggests a broader international operational scope rather than localized cybercriminal activity. The group's attack methodology details have not been extensively documented by major security firms, though their sector-specific targeting of education, agriculture and food production, technology, and government entities indicates a deliberate victim selection process rather than opportunistic attacks. With only seven known victims documented since their November 2024 emergence, Chort has maintained a relatively low profile compared to established ransomware operations, with no major high-profile incidents or law enforcement actions publicly reported by CISA, FBI, or prominent security researchers. The group remains active as of late 2024, though their limited victim count and recent emergence make it unclear whether they represent a nascent operation still developing their capabilities or a more selective targeting approach. The group has been linked to 7 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on November 17, 2024; most recent post November 22, 2024. The operation is currently inactive.
Sector and geography
This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Education sector, which has 1,082 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, texanscan.org is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by chort means texanscan.org 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, CISA (United States), as required for your jurisdiction.
- Monitor for the data appearing on chort'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.
