Was fote.com hit by ransomware?

fote.com was listed by the blackbasta ransomware operation (United States), and stolen data was published on the group's leak site. Darkfield tracks this disclosure with the original leak post, screenshot and group context.

Who is the blackbasta ransomware group?

blackbasta is a ransomware operator tracked by Darkfield. See the full operator dossier for its known victims, sectors targeted, IOCs and leak-site infrastructure.

What data was leaked in the fote.com breach?

blackbasta published data attributed to fote.com. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

Fruit of the Earth

listed as fote.com · Claimed by Blackbasta · listed 2 years ago

19m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedDec 18, 2024
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Blackbasta
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Consumer Services
Listed on leak site: Dec 18, 2024

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Fruit of the Earth is a family-owned American company founded in 1980, specializing in aloe vera and nature-inspired skincare, sun care, and health care products. Based in Grand Prairie, Texas, the company emphasizes ethical sourcing and environmentally friendly production practices, and its products reach millions of consumers globally.

Industry: Personal Care & Cosmetics Manufacturing
Address: 3325 W Trinity Blvd, Grand Prairie, Texas 75050, United States
Founded: 1980

Attack summary

Severity: high — Confirmed exfiltration of ~990 GB including sensitive business data (financial, payroll, R&D), employee PII, and confidential documents with data already published. Large data volume and diversity of sensitive categories elevates this beyond medium.

BlackBasta claims to have exfiltrated approximately 990 GB of data from Fruit of the Earth, including financial records, employee personal data, confidential documents, and R&D materials. The group has published the data as proof of the breach.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Financial data and accounts
Payroll records
Employee personal data and documents
Confidential data and NDAs
Research & Development materials

What the group claims

Fruit of the Earth, a prominent skin care company based in Grand Prairie, Texas. Founded in 1980, Fruit of the Earth specializes in producing high-quality aloe vera and nature-inspired products, including skin care, sun care, and health care items. The company operates as a family-owned business and emphasizes ethical sourcing and environmentally friendly practices in its production processes.SITE: www.fote.com Address : 3325 W Trinity Blvd Grand Prairie, Texas 75050 United StatesTEL#: (817) 510-1600ALL DATA SIZE: ≈990gb 1. Financial data, Accounts, Payroll 2. Personal employees data and docs 3. Confidential data, NDA 4. R&D & etc…

Sources

Victim sitefote.com
Leak posthttp://stniiomyjliimcgkvdszvgen3eaaoz55hreqqx6o77yvmpwt7gklffqd.onion/?id=fote.com

Source

Indexed 2 years 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 blackbasta

Black Basta is a highly sophisticated ransomware group that emerged in April 2022 and operates with a primary motivation of financial extortion, having rapidly established itself as one of the most prolific ransomware operations of the modern era with over 500 confirmed victims globally. The group is widely assessed by researchers including Mandiant and CISA to have likely ties to former members of the Conti ransomware syndicate following that group's dissolution in mid-2022, and operates as a private Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model with a closed affiliate structure rather than open recruitment, with suspected links to the FIN7 threat actor cluster based on observed tooling overlaps documented by SentinelOne and Microsoft. Black Basta employs a double extortion methodology, exfiltrating sensitive victim data prior to encryption and threatening publication on their Tor-based leak site "Basta News" to compound pressure on victims; initial access is predominantly achieved through phishing campaigns, purchase of stolen credentials, and exploitation of known vulnerabilities including QakBot malware distribution, with the group subsequently deploying tools such as Cobalt Strike, SystemBC, and their custom encryptor targeting both Windows and VMware ESXi environments using a ChaCha20 encryption algorithm. Per CISA and FBI joint advisory AA24-131A published in May 2024, the group has struck over 500 organizations across North America, Europe, and Australia, with high-profile victims including Ascension Health, Capita, the American Dental Association, and Rheinmetall, demonstrating a clear preference for manufacturing, business services, technology, transportation, and food production sectors across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Italy. As of the time of available public reporting, Black Basta remained operationally active, though internal chat logs leaked in early 2025 revealed significant internal tensions and potential organizational fragmentation that security researchers assessed could impact the group's near-term operational cohesion. The group has been linked to 523 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on April 26, 2022; most recent post January 11, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

December 18, 2024fote.com listed by blackbastaon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by blackbasta

blackbasta has been linked to 523 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full blackbasta dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Consumer Services sector, which has 829 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, fote.com is reported in United States, a country with 3,138 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by blackbasta means fote.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 blackbasta'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.