NotPetya is a destructive malware campaign — widely assessed by the intelligence community and leading cybersecurity researchers not as a traditional ransomware operation but as a cyberweapon disguised as ransomware — that emerged in June 2017 and caused catastrophic, indiscriminate damage to global organizations, with financial destruction rather than ransom collection assessed as a secondary concern to its primary destructive intent. Attributed with high confidence by the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and Australia to Sandworm Team, a threat actor operating under Russia's GRU military intelligence directorate, NotPetya is not a Ransomware-as-a-Service operation but rather a state-sponsored destructive tool, with links to earlier Sandworm campaigns including the BlackEnergy and Industroyer attacks targeting Ukrainian critical infrastructure. NotPetya gained initial access primarily through the poisoned Ukrainian accounting software MeDoc, leveraging a trojanized software update mechanism as a supply chain attack vector, subsequently propagating laterally at extraordinary speed using the EternalBlue and EternalRomance NSA-derived exploits alongside the Mimikatz credential harvesting tool, with no genuine decryption capability ever offered — rendering it a wiper rather than functional ransomware. The campaign struck Danish shipping giant Maersk, pharmaceutical company Merck, logistics firm FedEx subsidiary TNT Express, and Mondelez International among others, with total global damages estimated by the White House at approximately ten billion US dollars, representing one of the most economically destructive cyberattacks ever recorded. As a discrete campaign rather than an ongoing criminal group, NotPetya itself is not operationally active, though its parent threat actor Sandworm Team remains highly active and continues to conduct destructive cyber operations globally as of current reporting. The group has been linked to 1 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on January 1, 2017. The operation is currently inactive.
Sector and geography
This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Transportation sector, which has 47 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Maersk is reported in Denmark, a country with 14 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by NotPetya means Maersk 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, CFCS (Denmark), as required for your jurisdiction.
- Monitor for the data appearing on NotPetya'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.
