Shaoleaks is a relatively obscure ransomware group that emerged in November 2022, appearing to be financially motivated based on their operational patterns. The group's origin and potential affiliations remain unclear due to limited public reporting from major cybersecurity firms and law enforcement agencies. Available intelligence suggests the group employs standard ransomware deployment tactics, though specific details about their initial access vectors, encryption methods, or use of double extortion techniques have not been publicly documented by authoritative sources. The group has demonstrated a focused targeting approach, with documented attacks against media sector organizations, though the scale of their operations appears limited with only four known victims reported in open sources. Current intelligence indicates minimal ongoing activity from this group, with no recent high-profile incidents or law enforcement actions publicly reported, suggesting either dormancy, dissolution, or operations below the threshold of major security research attention. The group has been linked to 4 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on November 1, 2022. The operation is currently inactive.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by Shaoleaks means Welcome to new customers! 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 Shaoleaks'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.
