Was River City Science Academy hit by ransomware?

River City Science Academy was listed by the Karakurt ransomware operation (United States), and stolen data was published on the group's leak site. Darkfield tracks this disclosure with the original leak post, screenshot and group context.

Who is the Karakurt ransomware group?

Karakurt is a ransomware operator tracked by Darkfield. See the full operator dossier for its known victims, sectors targeted, IOCs and leak-site infrastructure.

What data was leaked in the River City Science Academy breach?

Karakurt published data attributed to River City Science Academy (~63 GB). Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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River City Science Academy

Claimed by Karakurt · listed 4 years ago

63 GB

Data size

42m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedJan 9, 2023
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Karakurt
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Education
Listed on leak site: Jan 9, 2023
Data size: 63 GB

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

River City Science Academy (RCSA) is a tuition-free, public STEM charter school network founded in 2007 and located in Jacksonville, Florida (Duval County). It operates six campuses serving approximately 5,000 students across grades K–12, with an emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. RCSA holds an A+ rating from the Florida Department of Education and maintains a 100% graduation rate.

Industry: K-12 Charter School Education (STEM-focused)
Address: Jacksonville, Florida (Duval County), United States
Founded: 2007

Attack summary

Severity: critical — 63 GB of confirmed exfiltrated and published data includes PII for minors (students K–12) and employees at scale, which constitutes regulated sensitive data under FERPA and state privacy laws, as well as financial and executive records from a public institution serving ~5,000 children.

Karakurt claims to have exfiltrated 63 GB of data from RCSA, including financial records, executive and accounting information, and a significant volume of personal data belonging to students and employees. The disclosed status indicates the data has been published.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Financial records
Executive communications
Accounting information
Personal student data (PII)
Personal employee data (PII)

What the group claims

River City Science Academy (RCSA) is a tuition-free, public charter school located in Duval County in Jacksonville, Florida. RCSA was founded in 2007 and currently serves grades K – 12 through 4 different locations. RCSA offers an emphasis on STEM education. In this release we will show you 63 GB of RCSA's data which include financials, executive and accounting information as well as a great amount of personal student and employee data.

Sources

Source

Indexed 4 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.

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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

January 9, 2023River City Science Academy listed by Karakurton the group's public leak site

Data size: 63 GB

Other recent disclosures by Karakurt

Karakurt has been linked to 74 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Karakurt dossier →

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, River City Science Academy is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Karakurt means River City Science Academy 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 Karakurt'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.