The Kraken ransomware group is a recently emerged threat actor that was first observed in February 2025, operating with apparent financial motivations and targeting organizations primarily across North America and Europe. Given the group's recent emergence and limited public documentation from major cybersecurity firms and law enforcement agencies, details about their country of origin, affiliations, and operational model remain largely unknown to security researchers. Based on their targeting pattern affecting at least 25 known victims across technology, business services, telecommunications, and manufacturing sectors, the group appears to employ conventional ransomware tactics, though specific details about their initial access vectors, encryption methods, or use of data exfiltration have not been publicly documented by CISA, FBI, or established security research organizations. The group's focus on developed Western markets, particularly the United States, Canada, Spain, Germany, and the United Kingdom, suggests a strategic approach to victim selection, though no major high-profile attacks or significant ransoms have been publicly reported by law enforcement or major incident response firms. As of current reporting, Kraken appears to remain active, though comprehensive threat intelligence on their operations remains limited due to their recent emergence and the absence of detailed public analysis from major cybersecurity organizations. The group has been linked to 25 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on February 9, 2025; most recent post November 13, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.
Sector and geography
This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Consumer Services sector, which has 829 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Kitty cookies is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by kraken means Kitty cookies 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 kraken'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.
