Hive is a financially motivated ransomware group that emerged in August 2021, operating as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model to maximize their criminal enterprise's reach and profitability. The group is suspected to have origins in Eastern Europe based on their operational patterns and linguistic indicators, though definitive attribution remains unclear, and they operate independently while recruiting affiliates to conduct attacks on their behalf. Hive primarily gains initial access through compromised Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) credentials, phishing campaigns, and exploitation of known vulnerabilities in public-facing applications, subsequently deploying their custom ransomware payload that uses a combination of RSA and AES encryption algorithms while simultaneously exfiltrating sensitive data before encryption to enable double extortion tactics where they threaten to publish stolen information if ransom demands are not met. The group has targeted over 208 victims globally with a particular focus on manufacturing companies, business services, information technology firms, healthcare services, and internet and telecommunication services, primarily in the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Indonesia, and China, including notable attacks against healthcare systems and critical infrastructure that drew significant attention from law enforcement agencies. In January 2023, the FBI announced the successful disruption of Hive's operations, seizing their dark web leak sites and decryption keys, effectively dismantling the group's infrastructure and providing free decryption tools to victims. The group has been linked to 208 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on August 14, 2021; most recent post January 16, 2023. The operation is currently inactive.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by hive means Friedrich 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 hive'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.
