Blackout is a recently emerged ransomware group that began operations in February 2024, with their primary motivation appearing to be financial gain through extortion activities. The group has demonstrated relatively limited scope with nine documented victims to date, but has shown geographic diversity in their targeting across Greece, France, Germany, Canada, and Croatia. Their sector preferences indicate a focus on business services, healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation/logistics industries, suggesting they may target organizations with critical operational dependencies that increase pressure for ransom payment. Due to the group's recent emergence and limited public documentation from major security firms and government agencies, details regarding their specific attack methodologies, initial access vectors, encryption techniques, and operational structure remain largely undocumented in open-source intelligence reporting. No major high-profile campaigns or significant law enforcement actions have been publicly reported in connection with this group's activities. Given the February 2024 first observation date and the relatively small victim count, Blackout appears to be a newly active but minor player in the ransomware landscape, though their current operational status and potential growth trajectory remain subjects for continued monitoring by threat intelligence analysts. The group has been linked to 9 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on February 26, 2024; most recent post December 10, 2024. The operation is currently inactive.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by Blackout means luzan5.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, INCIBE-CERT (Spain), as required for your jurisdiction.
- Monitor for the data appearing on Blackout'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.
