Skip to main content
Darkfield

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

Gaido & Fintzen

listed as Gaido-fintzen.com · Claimed by Cloak · listed 3 years ago

31m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedDec 13, 2023
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Cloak
Status
Data leaked
Country
United States
Sector
Financial Services
Listed on leak site
Dec 13, 2023

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Gaido & Fintzen is a full-service law firm established in 2002 with offices in Chicago and St. Charles, Illinois, and attorneys licensed throughout the United States. The firm serves businesses and individuals across practice areas including civil litigation, corporate practice, data privacy & security, employment practices, estate planning, intellectual property, real estate, and workers' compensation. The firm appears to be a mid-sized boutique with approximately 9 named attorneys listed on its website.

Industry
Legal Services (Law Firm)
Address
Chicago, IL and St. Charles, IL, United States
Employees
11-50
Founded
2002

Attack summary

Severity: critical — A law firm holds highly sensitive and privileged attorney-client communications, personal legal matters (estate planning, employment disputes), corporate confidential records, and potentially regulated data (financial, PII at scale). Data_published status confirms exfiltration and public release, making exposure of privileged legal information critical in severity.

The Cloak ransomware group claims an attack on Gaido & Fintzen and has published data (disclosed status: data_published). The leak post provides minimal detail, but the data_published status indicates exfiltration and public release of firm data.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Client legal files
  • Attorney-client communications
  • Corporate and business records
  • Estate planning documents
  • Employment-related records
  • Data privacy case files
  • Financial and tax records
  • Internal firm documents

What the group claims

Country: USA

Sources

Source

Indexed 3 years 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 Cloak

Cloak is a relatively new ransomware group that emerged in August 2023, operating with primarily financial motivations and demonstrating a broad international targeting scope with 162 documented victims across multiple sectors. The group's origin and specific affiliations remain undocumented in public threat intelligence reporting, though their operational patterns suggest they may operate independently rather than as part of a larger ransomware-as-a-service ecosystem. Limited public documentation exists regarding their specific attack methodologies, encryption techniques, or data exfiltration practices, though their targeting patterns indicate sophisticated capabilities to compromise organizations across diverse sectors including business services, technology, healthcare, and manufacturing. The group has demonstrated a preference for targeting victims in English-speaking countries and Western Europe, with the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy representing their primary geographic focus areas. Cloak appears to remain active as of current reporting, though the relative scarcity of detailed public analysis from major threat intelligence firms suggests either operational security effectiveness or a lower profile compared to more established ransomware operations. The group has been linked to 166 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on August 24, 2023; most recent post June 18, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • December 13, 2023Gaido-fintzen.com listed by Cloakon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Cloak

Cloak has been linked to 166 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Cloak 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, Gaido-fintzen.com is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Cloak means Gaido-fintzen.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 Cloak'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.