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City of Bellville

listed as www.cityofbellville.com · Claimed by VanHelsing · listed 1 year ago

16m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedMar 17, 2025
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
VanHelsing
Status
Data leaked
Country
United States
Sector
Public Sector
Listed on leak site
Mar 17, 2025

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Bellville is the county seat of Austin County in southeastern Texas, established in 1846. As a municipal government entity, it provides administrative, public safety, and community services to a population of approximately 3,794 residents.

Industry
Local Government / Public Administration
Address
Bellville, Texas 77418, United States
Founded
1846

Attack summary

Severity: medium — Public sector entity with operational systems compromised and data published, but no specific regulated data categories (PII at scale, financial records) confirmed in the post. Lack of detailed proof inventory limits confidence in breach severity.

VanHelsing claims to have compromised the City of Bellville's website and systems. The group has published data without stating specific exfiltration details or operational disruption.

medium

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Municipal records
  • Website data
  • City administration files

What the group claims

Bellville is a city in and the county seat of Austin County, Texas, in the southeastern part of the state. The population was 3,794 at the 2000 census. Bellville was named for Thomas B. Bell, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred, after he donated land for the new county seat established by voters in 1846. The original county seat was located in San Felipe. Bellville is located at the inter

Sources

Source

Indexed 1 year 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 VanHelsing

VanHelsing is a recently emerged ransomware group first observed in March 2025, appearing to be financially motivated based on their targeting patterns and operational characteristics. Given their recent emergence and limited public documentation, details about their specific country of origin and affiliations remain unclear, though their targeting of multiple Western nations suggests they may operate from outside these jurisdictions. The group has demonstrated a preference for high-value sectors including healthcare, technology, and financial services, with attacks spanning the United States, Australia, Chile, France, and Italy, though their specific attack vectors and technical methodologies have not been extensively documented by major security firms or government agencies. With only eight known victims since their March 2025 emergence, VanHelsing appears to be a smaller-scale operation that may be conducting targeted attacks rather than broad spray-and-pray campaigns. The group remains active as of current reporting, though the limited public intelligence available suggests they have not yet achieved the notoriety or scale of more established ransomware operations. The group has been linked to 8 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on March 17, 2025; most recent post April 5, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • March 17, 2025www.cityofbellville.com listed by VanHelsingon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by VanHelsing

VanHelsing has been linked to 8 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full VanHelsing dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Public Sector sector, which has 466 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, www.cityofbellville.com is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by VanHelsing means www.cityofbellville.com 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 VanHelsing'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.