Was FINANCE INSTITUTION AUCTION hit by ransomware?

FINANCE INSTITUTION AUCTION was listed by the Karakurt 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 Karakurt ransomware group?

Karakurt 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 FINANCE INSTITUTION AUCTION breach?

Karakurt published data attributed to FINANCE INSTITUTION AUCTION (~4 TB), around 861.839 SSNs records. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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FINANCE INSTITUTION AUCTION

Claimed by Karakurt · listed 3 years ago

4 TB

Data size

861.839 SSNs records

40m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedMar 29, 2023
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Karakurt
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Financial Services
Listed on leak site: Mar 29, 2023
Data size: 4 TB
Records: 861.839 SSNs

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

The victim is described by the threat actor as a microfinance institution operating in the United States within the financial services sector. The organization extends loans to consumers and maintains large-scale debtor databases including personal and financial information. No public website was available to confirm further operational details.

Industry: Microfinance & Consumer Lending

Attack summary

Severity: critical — Confirmed exfiltration of nearly 2.9 million SSNs alongside 3 million loan records containing PII, financial details, and debtor profiles constitutes a large-scale breach of highly regulated financial and personally identifiable data, meeting the threshold for critical severity.

Karakurt claims to have exfiltrated approximately 4 TB of data from the organization, including nearly 2.9 million SSNs, a 3-million-record loan database with PII, CRM backups, VIP user mailboxes, and accounting and legal data; the group threatens to auction the data if ransom negotiations do not proceed.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

2,861,839 Social Security Numbers (SSNs)
Loan status records (~3 million lines)
Debtor addresses, last names, phone numbers, email addresses
Debtor characteristic/profile data
Client financial data
Accounting data
Legal data
CRM backups
VIP user mailboxes (fully dumped)

What the group claims

We're happy to present you a brilliant 4TB stolen from a microfinance institution. We have 2,861,839 SSNs in total. Beside this, we hold other high value databases - for example, a gigantic database with 3 million lines, which contains information about the status of the loan, addresses, last names, phone numbers, mails, and even the characteristics of the debtor - very entertaining reading.Moreover, we have finance, clients data, accounting data, legal data, CRM backups, fully dumped VIP users mailboxes and more.If the company representatives will continue acting non-negotiable, these data will be put up for auction. Stay tuned. You will definitely enjoy it!

Source

Indexed 3 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 Karakurt

Karakurt is a ransomware group that emerged in December 2022, operating primarily as a data extortion threat actor with financial motivations rather than traditional file encryption. The group's origin and affiliations remain largely undocumented by major cybersecurity agencies, though their operational patterns suggest they function as an independent entity rather than a confirmed ransomware-as-a-service operation. Karakurt employs data theft and extortion tactics, focusing on exfiltrating sensitive information from victim networks before demanding payment under threat of public disclosure, representing a pure extortion model that bypasses traditional encryption-based ransomware approaches. The group has targeted 74 known victims across multiple sectors, with particular focus on healthcare, education, manufacturing, energy, and professional services organizations, primarily affecting entities in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, and India. Based on available reporting from established cybersecurity agencies and researchers, Karakurt appears to remain active as of recent assessments, though comprehensive intelligence on their specific attack vectors, tools, and major campaigns remains limited in publicly documented sources from CISA, FBI, and major security research organizations. The group has been linked to 74 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on December 11, 2022; most recent post September 22, 2023. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

March 29, 2023FINANCE INSTITUTION AUCTION listed by Karakurton the group's public leak site

Data size: 4 TB
Records: 861.839 SSNs

Other recent disclosures by Karakurt

Karakurt has been linked to 74 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Karakurt dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Financial Services sector, which has 1,184 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, FINANCE INSTITUTION AUCTION is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Karakurt means FINANCE INSTITUTION AUCTION 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 Karakurt'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.