**Coldlock** is a relatively obscure ransomware group that first emerged in March 2020, operating with apparent financial motivations. The group has maintained a low profile with limited documented activity, having been linked to only three known victim organizations. Little is publicly documented about Coldlock's country of origin or operational structure, though their targeting patterns suggest a focus on critical infrastructure sectors. The group primarily targets organizations in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the energy sector as well as healthcare and public health organizations. Limited public reporting from established security firms means their specific attack methodologies, encryption techniques, and initial access vectors remain largely undocumented in mainstream threat intelligence sources. No major high-profile campaigns or significant law enforcement actions against Coldlock have been publicly reported by CISA, FBI, or major security research organizations. Due to the sparse public documentation and limited victim count since 2020, it is unclear whether the group remains active, has ceased operations, or operates under a different name. The group has been linked to 3 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on March 19, 2020; most recent post May 5, 2020. The operation is currently inactive.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by coldlock means CPC Corp. (Tawain's state-owned energy company) 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.
- Monitor for the data appearing on coldlock'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.
