Cryptoware is an obscure ransomware group that first emerged in January 2015 with apparent financial motivations, though limited public documentation exists about their operations. The group's origin and affiliations remain unclear, with no confirmed country of origin or established links to other ransomware families documented by major security researchers. Based on available intelligence, Cryptoware appears to have specifically targeted emergency services infrastructure in the United States, representing a concerning focus on critical services that could impact public safety and emergency response capabilities. The group's attack methodology, encryption techniques, and whether they employed data exfiltration tactics remain undocumented in publicly available threat intelligence reports from CISA, FBI, or major security firms. With only one confirmed victim on record and no notable campaigns or high-profile attacks documented by reputable sources, Cryptoware appears to have operated with limited scope and impact compared to more prominent ransomware groups. The current operational status of Cryptoware is unclear, with no recent activity or law enforcement actions publicly reported. The group has been linked to 1 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on January 1, 2015. The operation is currently inactive.
Sector and geography
This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Emergency Services sector, which has 9 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Midlothian Police Department is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by cryptoware means Midlothian Police Department 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 cryptoware'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.
