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HiringSteps

listed as hiringsteps.com · Claimed by Cipherforce · listed 5 months ago

4m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedFeb 23, 2026
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Cipherforce
Status
Data leaked
Country
United States
Sector
Business Services
Listed on leak site
Feb 23, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

HiringSteps (hiringsteps.com) is a cloud-based recruitment platform designed to streamline hiring processes for businesses of various sizes. The platform enables recruiters to post job openings, source candidates, conduct interviews, check references, and manage job offers within a single integrated system. It serves employers, recruiters, and candidates with the goal of reducing administrative overhead in recruitment workflows.

Industry
HR Technology & Recruitment Software

Attack summary

Severity: medium — Data is marked as published, suggesting exfiltration occurred, but the leak post is AI-generated with no specific data inventory, proof files, or volume cited. A recruitment platform would likely hold PII (candidate resumes, contact details, employer data), which carries moderate-to-high sensitivity, but the absence of any concrete evidence or proof limits confidence in severity.

The cipherforce group claims to have published data from HiringSteps.com, with the disclosure status marked as data_published. The leak post description appears AI-generated and provides no specific details about the nature of exfiltrated data or whether encryption was involved.

medium

Original description

AI-summarised, not from the leak post

"HiringSteps.com" is a robust online cloud-based platform designed to streamline the recruitment processes for businesses of different sizes. The platform allows recruiters to post job openings, source candidates, conduct interviews, check references, and send job offers all in one place. It aims to simplify recruitment by reducing paperwork and improving coordination among employers, recruiters, and candidates.

Sources

Source

Indexed 5 months 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 cipherforce

CipherForce is a relatively new ransomware group that emerged in February 2026, 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 victims across the United States, United Arab Emirates, India, China, and Vietnam suggests either a geographically distributed operation or deliberate international scope. With only six known victims documented to date, the group appears to focus on technology companies, business services, and transportation/logistics sectors, though their attack methodology and specific tools have not been extensively documented by major threat intelligence firms or law enforcement agencies. No notable high-profile campaigns or significant ransoms have been publicly reported by CISA, FBI, or established security researchers, likely due to the group's recent emergence and relatively small victim count. CipherForce appears to remain active as of current reporting, though their limited operational history makes it difficult to assess their long-term viability or potential for expansion. The group has been linked to 6 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on February 23, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • February 23, 2026hiringsteps.com listed by cipherforceon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by cipherforce

cipherforce has been linked to 6 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full cipherforce dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Business Services sector, which has 3,796 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, hiringsteps.com is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by cipherforce means hiringsteps.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 cipherforce'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.