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highwirepress.com

Claimed by Babuk · listed 1 year ago

16m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedMar 18, 2025
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Babuk
Status
Data leaked
Country
United States
Sector
Technology
Listed on leak site
Mar 18, 2025

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

HighWire Press is a digital publishing platform provider founded in 1995 and spun out of Stanford University. They provide end-to-end solutions for scholarly publishers including manuscript submission, peer review, content hosting, publication, and analytics. The platform serves major academic journals, university presses, and scientific publishers globally, with 60 million monthly users and 200 million key activities per month.

Industry
Scholarly Publishing & Digital Publishing Services
Founded
1995

Attack summary

Severity: high — HighWire Press hosts critical scholarly publishing infrastructure serving major academic institutions and journals globally. A successful breach could impact millions of researchers and disrupt access to peer-reviewed scientific content. The company processes sensitive manuscript data, subscriber information, and controls access to published research across multiple high-profile publishers.

Babuk ransomware group claims an attack on HighWire Press. The leak post provides minimal detail; no specific data exfiltration or encryption claims are detailed in the provided excerpt.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Academic journal content
  • Publisher metadata
  • Subscriber/user information
  • Manuscript submissions
  • Platform configuration data

What the group claims

highwirepress.com

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.

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Disclosure context

About Babuk

Babuk is a ransomware group that emerged in October 2020, operating primarily for financial gain through extortion campaigns targeting organizations across multiple sectors. The group is believed to have originated from Russian-speaking cybercriminal networks and operates independently rather than as a traditional Ransomware-as-a-Service model, though they have shown willingness to collaborate with affiliates. Babuk typically gains initial access through exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities in public-facing applications and weak remote desktop protocol credentials, employs double extortion tactics by exfiltrating sensitive data before deploying their custom encryption malware, and threatens to publish stolen information on their dedicated leak site if ransom demands are not met. The group gained significant notoriety in May 2021 when they successfully breached the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, stealing and threatening to release sensitive law enforcement data including information on criminal investigations and police personnel. Following increased law enforcement attention after the police department attack, Babuk announced in May 2021 that they were ceasing ransomware operations and would focus solely on data theft and extortion, though various security researchers have observed continued sporadic activity from the group or actors using similar tools and techniques. The group has been linked to 188 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on October 25, 2020; most recent post April 23, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • March 18, 2025highwirepress.com listed by Babukon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Babuk

Babuk has been linked to 188 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Babuk dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Technology sector, which has 3,549 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, highwirepress.com is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Babuk means highwirepress.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, CISA (United States), as required for your jurisdiction.
  • Monitor for the data appearing on Babuk'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.