BitPaymer is a ransomware group first observed in August 2017, operating with a primary financial motivation and known for conducting targeted, high-value intrusions against enterprise environments rather than opportunistic mass campaigns. The group is widely attributed to the cybercriminal organization known as Evil Corp, a Russia-nexus threat actor led by Maksim Yakubov and associates previously linked to the Dridex banking trojan operations, functioning as a closely held, non-RaaS criminal enterprise rather than an open affiliate model. BitPaymer has been consistently delivered via Dridex as a post-compromise payload, with initial access typically achieved through phishing campaigns and malicious document lures, followed by extended dwell time for lateral movement and reconnaissance prior to encryption, with the group known to exfiltrate sensitive data as leverage in ransom negotiations. Notable campaigns include a 2017 attack against the National Health Service in Scotland and subsequent targeting of multiple U.S. municipal governments and private sector organizations, with the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioning Evil Corp members in December 2019 in connection with BitPaymer operations, significantly complicating ransom payment pathways for victims. Based on publicly available telemetry reflecting nine known victims concentrated in the United States, Germany, Mexico, Spain, and France across manufacturing, telecommunications, agriculture and food production, energy, and technology sectors, BitPaymer activity has largely been superseded by successor ransomware variants attributed to Evil Corp including WastedLocker, Hades, and Phoenix CryptoLocker, representing a series of rebranding efforts likely undertaken to evade the consequences of the 2019 sanctions. The group has been linked to 9 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on August 25, 2017; most recent post November 10, 2019. The operation is currently inactive.
Also tracked as: FriedEx, IEncrypt.
Sector and geography
This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Public Sector sector, which has 466 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Borough of Matanuska-Susitna (Mat-Su) is reported in United States, a country with 3,115 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.
If your organisation is affected
A listing by bitpaymer means Borough of Matanuska-Susitna (Mat-Su) 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 bitpaymer'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.
