Was City of Modesto, CA hit by ransomware?

City of Modesto, CA was listed by the Snatch 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 Snatch ransomware group?

Snatch 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 City of Modesto, CA breach?

Snatch published data attributed to City of Modesto, CA. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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City of Modesto, CA

Claimed by Snatch · listed 3 years ago

40m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedMar 27, 2023
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Snatch
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Government
Listed on leak site: Mar 27, 2023

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

The City of Modesto is the municipal government of Modesto, California, serving as the official local government authority for one of the largest cities in the San Joaquin Valley. It provides a broad range of public services including fire protection, police, utilities, permitting, community development, and public works. The city operates under a council-manager form of government and serves a population of approximately 220,000 residents.

Industry: Municipal Government
Address: Modesto, CA, United States
Employees: 1000-5000

Attack summary

Severity: critical — The victim is a municipal government entity with data published by the threat actor. Government systems typically contain large volumes of regulated PII (resident records, utility billing, police reports, employee data), and confirmed data publication against a public sector target constitutes a critical-severity disclosure.

The Snatch ransomware group claims to have attacked the City of Modesto and has disclosed the status as data_published, indicating exfiltration and publication of data. The specific nature and volume of the published data is not detailed in the truncated leak post.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Government administrative records
Employee data
Resident/citizen PII
Financial records
Internal communications
Utility billing data
Police/public safety records

What the group claims

Proudly serving, protecting and partnering with our community for a safer Modesto.

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.

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Disclosure context

About Snatch

Snatch is a ransomware group that emerged in November 2021, operating with primarily financial motivations and targeting organizations across multiple sectors including business services, government, education, manufacturing, and healthcare. The group has compromised at least 142 known victims, with their attacks concentrated primarily in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, India, and France. Little is publicly documented about Snatch's specific country of origin or affiliations with other cybercriminal organizations, though their operational patterns suggest they function as an independent ransomware operation. The group's attack methodology and specific technical details regarding initial access vectors, encryption methods, and data exfiltration practices have not been extensively documented in public threat intelligence reports from major security firms or government agencies. While Snatch has maintained a notable victim count across diverse geographic regions and industry sectors, there are no widely reported major campaigns or high-profile attacks that have drawn significant public attention or law enforcement action. Based on available public information, Snatch appears to remain an active ransomware operation as of recent reporting periods, though comprehensive details about their current operational status and recent activities are limited in open-source intelligence. The group has been linked to 142 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on November 29, 2021; most recent post May 16, 2024. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

March 27, 2023City of Modesto, CA listed by Snatchon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Snatch

Snatch has been linked to 142 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Snatch dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Government sector, which has 685 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, City of Modesto, CA is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Snatch means City of Modesto, CA 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 Snatch'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.