Skip to main content
Darkfield

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

Australian National University

listed as A*u.edu.au · Claimed by Flocker · listed 1 year ago

17m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedFeb 16, 2025
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Flocker
Status
Data leaked
Country
Australia
Sector
Education
Listed on leak site
Feb 16, 2025

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Australian National University (ANU) is a major research-led institution based in Canberra, Australia. It is one of the country's oldest and most prestigious universities, offering undergraduate and postgraduate education across multiple disciplines.

Industry
Higher Education & Research
Founded
1946

Attack summary

Severity: high — Confirmed exfiltration from a major educational institution with likely access to student PII, research data, and institutional records; data publication announced. No specific proof files quantified in the truncated post.

Flocker claims to have compromised ANU's servers (A*u.edu.au) and extracted data before encryption. The group states they accessed and exfiltrated unspecified content from the institution.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • institutional records
  • research data
  • student/staff information

What the group claims

To the board of A********n N******l U********y We have took over the servers A*u.edu.au and before encryption we extracted all […]

Sources

Source

Indexed 1 year 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.

Is this your supplier? Your competitor? You?

Pro plans monitor your domain, corporate emails, and crypto wallets across every new ransomware leak-site post, breach dump and Telegram callout — alerts within 5 minutes.

Disclosure context

About Flocker

Flocker is a relatively new ransomware group that emerged in May 2024, operating with apparent financial motivations and having compromised at least 59 known victims within a short operational timeframe. The group's origin and affiliations remain largely undocumented by major threat intelligence organizations, with no confirmed country of origin or clear operational model regarding RaaS capabilities established in public reporting. Based on available targeting data, Flocker appears to employ opportunistic attack methodologies that have successfully compromised organizations across diverse sectors including technology, public sector, financial services, and transportation/logistics, though specific technical details regarding their initial access vectors, encryption methods, or data exfiltration practices have not been publicly documented by authoritative sources. The group has demonstrated a notable geographic reach with victims identified across the United States, UAE, Taiwan, Canada, and Zambia, suggesting either broad targeting capabilities or affiliate operations, though no specific high-profile campaigns or major incidents have been publicly attributed to them by federal agencies or established security researchers. As of current reporting, Flocker appears to remain active given their recent emergence timeline, though comprehensive threat intelligence regarding their operations remains limited in open-source reporting from authoritative cybersecurity organizations. The group has been linked to 59 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on May 3, 2024; most recent post July 31, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • February 16, 2025A*u.edu.au listed by Flockeron the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Flocker

Flocker has been linked to 59 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Flocker dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Education sector, which has 1,082 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, A*u.edu.au is reported in Australia, a country with 455 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Flocker means A*u.edu.au 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, ACSC (Australia), as required for your jurisdiction.
  • Monitor for the data appearing on Flocker'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.