Was Epoch Times hit by ransomware?

Epoch Times was listed by the coinbasecartel ransomware operation (United States), and stolen data was published on the group's leak site. Darkfield tracks this disclosure with the original leak post, screenshot and group context.

Who is the coinbasecartel ransomware group?

coinbasecartel is a ransomware operator tracked by Darkfield. See the full operator dossier for its known victims, sectors targeted, IOCs and leak-site infrastructure.

What data was leaked in the Epoch Times breach?

coinbasecartel published data attributed to Epoch Times. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

Epoch Times

Claimed by Coinbasecartel · listed 2 months ago

59d

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedApr 15, 2026
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Coinbasecartel
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Consumer Services
Listed on leak site: Apr 15, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

The Epoch Times is an American multi-language media company founded in 2000 by Chinese-American Falun Gong practitioners, headquartered in New York City. It operates newspapers, news websites, and video content across dozens of countries and publishes in over 20 languages, covering news, politics, health, and culture. The company also promotes Shen Yun Performing Arts and content aligned with Falun Gong perspectives.

Industry: Digital & Print News Media
Address: 229 W 28th St, New York, NY 10001, USA
Employees: 1001-5000
Founded: 2000

Attack summary

Severity: medium — Data is marked as published, indicating confirmed exfiltration and release; however, no specific data categories, volume, or proof file count are described in the post, preventing a higher severity classification. A major media organisation's internal data being published carries moderate-to-significant business and source-protection risk.

The group 'coinbasecartel' claims to have disclosed data belonging to Epoch Times, with the post marked as 'data_published', indicating exfiltration and publication of company data; no ransom amount or specific data volume was stated in the post.

medium

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Unspecified published data files

Original description

AI-summarised, not from the leak post

Epoch Times is an American media company founded in 2000 by Chinese-American Falun Gong practitioners. It operates newspapers, websites, and video content across multiple countries, publishing in numerous languages. The company covers news, politics, health, and culture, but has drawn scrutiny from researchers and platforms for spreading misinformation and promoting far-right narratives. It is headquartered in New York, USA.

The leak post

captured from the group's site

System Breach • Coinbasecartel We are looking for new partners/insiders. Send us a message to dicuss We are looking for new partners/insiders. Send us a message to dicuss CRITICAL ANNOUNCEMENTS &times; Contact Update We have changed our contact method. We now exclusively use qTox Messenger for all communications. SimpleX and Session have been discontinued. Our Tox ID: A7580331D4D16453CCE86D7ADFBCF0CEED0D0D1AEA8F4DBEEBCA9E3B46308F260DE9B41BD838 TO APTIM You may have noticed the sudden, heavy silence. The corporate VPNs are dead. We have been the silent architects of your network for the past three weeks. While your &#34;elite&#34; investigators from Mandiant sat in your logs, we sat directly beside them burning through over a hundred of your corporate identities like disposable tools. we have had your entire network and internal protocols. HOW LONG WILL YOU KEEP YOUR THOUSANDS OF FIELD WORKERS LOCKED OUT? We have successfully exfiltrated the most sensitive engineering data held by any firm in your sectors We hold the complete Navisworks 3D models, P&amp;ID diagrams, and maintenance logic for your major energy plants. This includes the granular Honeywell DCS controller logic. We know…

Sources

Victim siteepochtimes.com
Leak posthttp://fjg4zi4opkxkvdz7mvwp7h6goe4tcby3hhkrz43pht4j3vakhy75znyd.onion/companies/epoch

Source

Indexed 2 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.

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 coinbasecartel

CoinbaseCartel is a ransomware group that emerged in September 2025 with financially motivated operations targeting organizations across multiple sectors and geographic regions. The group has demonstrated significant activity in a short timeframe, compromising at least 102 known victims primarily across the United States, United Arab Emirates, Germany, Canada, and Brazil. Their targeting patterns show a preference for technology companies, financial services organizations, manufacturing entities, and consumer services businesses, suggesting an opportunistic approach focused on organizations likely to have both valuable data and the financial resources to pay ransoms. Given the group's recent emergence and limited public documentation from established threat intelligence sources, details regarding their specific attack methodologies, infrastructure, and organizational structure remain largely unconfirmed by major cybersecurity firms or law enforcement agencies. The group appears to maintain active operations as of late 2025, though comprehensive analysis of their tactics, techniques, and procedures awaits further investigation and reporting by established threat intelligence organizations. The group has been linked to 187 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on September 15, 2025; most recent post June 10, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Also tracked as: coinbase cartel.

Timeline of this disclosure

April 15, 2026Epoch Times listed by coinbasecartelon the group's public leak site

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Consumer Services sector, which has 396 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Epoch Times is reported in United States, a country with 2,714 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by coinbasecartel means Epoch Times 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.
Monitor for the data appearing on coinbasecartel'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.