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ESOP Direct

listed as esopdirect.com · Claimed by LockBit · listed 7 months ago

6m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedDec 31, 2025
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
LockBit
Status
Data leaked
Country
India
Sector
Financial Services
Listed on leak site
Dec 31, 2025

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

ESOP Direct is an India-based firm specializing in the equity compensation domain, offering services including plan design and administration of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). The company serves corporate clients managing equity-based employee benefit programs. Its focus is on the legal, financial, and administrative aspects of equity compensation.

Industry
Equity Compensation & ESOP Administration Services

Attack summary

Severity: critical — ESOP Direct handles sensitive financial and employee compensation data including personal and financial records of plan participants at scale; data has been confirmed published (data_published status), making this a critical disclosure of regulated financial and PII data in the financial services sector.

LockBit claims to have attacked ESOP Direct and has published data from the breach. The disclosed status indicates data has been exfiltrated and published, though the specific data volume was not stated in the leak post.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Equity compensation plan documents
  • Employee stock ownership records
  • Corporate client data
  • Financial compensation data
  • Personally identifiable information of plan participants

What the group claims

ESOP Direct: ESOP Direct, focussed on the Equity compensation domain, is engaged in Plan Design, Le...

Sources

Source

Indexed 7 months 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 LockBit

LockBit is a highly prolific ransomware group that emerged in October 2020 and has become one of the most active ransomware operations globally, with over 3,500 documented victims and a primary motivation of financial gain through extortion. The group is suspected to originate from Russia and operates as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model, recruiting affiliates to conduct attacks while providing them with ransomware tools, infrastructure, and support. LockBit primarily gains initial access through exploiting vulnerabilities in public-facing applications, credential stuffing attacks, and phishing campaigns, employing double extortion tactics where they steal sensitive data before encrypting systems and threatening to leak the information if ransom demands are not met. The group has demonstrated significant technical sophistication, developing multiple variants including LockBit 3.0 (also known as LockBit Black), and has been particularly active in targeting business services, manufacturing, technology, and healthcare sectors across the United States, France, Germany, United Kingdom, and Italy. Despite ongoing law enforcement efforts and international cooperation to disrupt their operations, including seizures of infrastructure and arrests of affiliates, LockBit has shown resilience and adaptability, continuing to operate and evolve their tactics while maintaining their position as one of the most dominant ransomware threats in the cybercriminal landscape. The group has been linked to 3,536 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on October 21, 2020; most recent post March 30, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Also tracked as: LockBit 3.0, LockBit Black, LockBit Green, ABCD ransomware.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • December 31, 2025esopdirect.com listed by LockBiton the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by LockBit

LockBit has been linked to 3,536 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full LockBit 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, esopdirect.com is reported in India, a country with 381 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by LockBit means esopdirect.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, CERT-In (India), as required for your jurisdiction.
  • Monitor for the data appearing on LockBit'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.