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John Engel Team

Claimed by ShadowByt3$ · listed 3 days ago

3d
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedSep 10, 2026
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
ShadowByt3$
Status
Data leaked
Country
United States
Sector
Professional Services
Listed on leak site
Sep 10, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

John Engel Team is a real estate brokerage operation affiliated with Elliman, operating through the RealScout platform. The team manages a customer relationship database for residential real estate sales and lead nurturing.

Industry
Real Estate & Brokerage Services

Attack summary

Severity: high — Confirmed exfiltration of 14,476 customer records containing PII (names, emails, contact details), detailed behavioral/intent data, financial records including payment card details, and administrative credentials. This represents significant scale and sensitivity of personal and business data. Real estate customer databases typically include property preferences and financial indicators, placing them in a sensitive category.

ShadowByt3$ claims to have exfiltrated the complete customer database (14,476 records) along with behavioral analytics, financial records, and administrative credentials. The group states they have encrypted or stolen data and are demanding negotiation within 72 hours, threatening to publish to underground forums and notification sites.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • 14,476 customer contact records
  • Behavioral tracking and intent metrics
  • Email engagement logs
  • Property viewing and interest history
  • 40 invoice PDFs
  • Corporate payment method details
  • Administrative credentials and personal profile data
  • Real estate license numbers
  • Corporate email addresses and phone numbers
  • Marketing templates and branding assets

The group's post references roughly 1 proof image proof files.

What the group claims

Contact us and negotiate. Don't be like the other real estate companies we have breached. We have serious data which contains the following below. Also we have a image url too to show you that we are not bluffing negotiate and we will remove your name and show you all the proof you want. url: http://sdwbyttda4uzwdffbt4m7niuodiwhcgmkyxqg5nly2bjxqa6xtbe3fyd.onion/invoice.png Data Compromised: the leak contains 0.014 million contacts (exactly 14,476 unique customer records). The following was stolen 1. Complete Identity and Client Databases (14,476 Total Profiles) The extraction completely drains the brokerage team's customer network, divided into three distinct lifecycle tables: - 10,993 Nurtured Contacts: - 3,306 Archived Contacts: - 177 Awaiting Nurture Contacts: The fresh pipeline of new inquiries, open-house visitors, and active 30-day leads. 2. Deep Behavioral Tracking & Psychological Analytics For every single one of those 14,476 profiles, We stole exact behavioral history and intent metrics, including: - Predictive Intent Metrics: scout score and score change counters that signal exactly when a high-net-worth client is getting ready to purchase. - Direct Interaction Metrics: Explicit lists of Homes Viewed, Homes Interested (properties starred or liked), Home Value Alert Views, and Market Activity Alert Views. - Communication Analytics: Logs of Email receives, Email opens, email clicks, email rejects, and system Errors mapping out exactly how responsive a customer is to digital alerts. 3. Corporate Financial and Transaction Data - 40 Invoice PDFs: A localized batch of billing records detailing contractual pricing, vendor relationships, and enterprise account balances. - Corporate Payment Method: Active account billing profiles, explicitly exposing a corporate Visa card ending in 8265 with an expiration date of 01/29. 4. Direct Brand Impersonation Assets - Administrative Access Details: The team leader’s personal profile details, including name, primary corporate emails ([email protected], [email protected]), direct contact phone numbers (203 247 4700), and official state real estate license number (RES.0787476). - High-Definition Media Links: Pristine branding paths hosted on the platform's live AWS CloudFront CDN network (d1buiexcd5gara.cloudfront.net - Operational Templates: The exact welcoming and onboarding text strings used by the agents to register new users. The .csv is in the format below: Nurtured_Contacts Name,Email,scout score,score change,type,tags,created at,Auto Nurture Active,Alerts,Email receives,Email opens,email rejects,email clicks,Homes Viewed,Homes Interested,Home Value Alert Views,Market Activity Alert Views,Errors,Starred and that is for all of them. If you don't negotiate we will sell it on underground forums for one person only and we will send proofs to bleepingcomputer and haveibeenpwned. You have 72 hours to negotiate it will get leaked on 09/12/2026 at 10:10 PM New York Time EST/EDT. To negotiate are session is below for negotiations only session: 05dd14d0860cb5d6901de01af2a84c026d914197d0f8ed892085ea3be556563301 contact us via email has a second option: [email protected]

Sources

Source

Indexed 3 days 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 ShadowByt3$

ShadowByt3$ is an emerging ransomware group that was first observed in February 2026, appearing to be financially motivated based on its ransomware operations. The group's country of origin and any potential affiliations with other cybercriminal organizations remain unknown due to limited intelligence available on this newly identified threat actor. Given the minimal public documentation available, the group's attack methodology, tools, and operational tactics have not been sufficiently analyzed or reported by major cybersecurity firms or government agencies. No notable campaigns, high-profile victims, or significant ransoms have been publicly documented by CISA, FBI, Mandiant, or other reputable security researchers, with only one known victim reported to date and no specific sector targeting patterns identified. The current operational status of ShadowByt3$ remains unclear due to the limited intelligence available on this recently emerged and relatively unknown ransomware operation. The group has been linked to 26 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on February 25, 2026; most recent post September 10, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • September 10, 2026John Engel Team listed by ShadowByt3$ on the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by ShadowByt3$

ShadowByt3$ has been linked to 26 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full ShadowByt3$ dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Professional Services sector, which has 17 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, John Engel Team is reported in United States, a country with 3,165 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by ShadowByt3$ means John Engel Team 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 ShadowByt3$'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.