Dharma is a ransomware family that first emerged in December 2016, operating primarily as a financially motivated cybercriminal enterprise that has targeted organizations across multiple sectors through opportunistic attacks. The group's origins and specific affiliations remain largely undocumented in major threat intelligence reports, though their operational patterns suggest they function as independent actors rather than a formal ransomware-as-a-service operation. Dharma operators typically gain initial access through brute force attacks against Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) services and exploit weak or default credentials, subsequently deploying their ransomware payload that encrypts files and appends distinctive extensions to affected systems. Based on available data, the group has conducted limited documented campaigns with only two confirmed victims, primarily targeting critical manufacturing and government facilities in the United States and Ukraine, suggesting a preference for high-value infrastructure targets. Current intelligence indicates minimal recent activity from Dharma operators, with the group appearing to maintain low-profile operations or potentially having reduced their operational tempo since their initial emergence. The group has been linked to 2 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on December 5, 2016; most recent post June 1, 2020. The operation is currently inactive.
Sector and geography
This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Government Facilities sector, which has 84 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Carroll County Sheriff's Office and another unspecified agency in the county is reported in United States, a country with 7,392 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.
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.
