Was vaud-promotion hit by ransomware?

vaud-promotion was listed by the Darkrace ransomware operation (Switzerland), 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 Darkrace ransomware group?

Darkrace 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 vaud-promotion breach?

Darkrace published data attributed to vaud-promotion. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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Vaud Promotion

listed as vaud-promotion · Claimed by Darkrace · listed 3 years ago

37m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedJun 7, 2023
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Darkrace
Status: Data leaked
Country: Switzerland
Sector: Government
Listed on leak site: Jun 7, 2023

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Vaud Promotion is a Swiss association dedicated to increasing the notoriety, competitiveness, and attractiveness of the Canton of Vaud under the VAUD+ brand. It operates across economic, academic, tourism, cultural, sports, and gastronomic sectors, animating a multi-sectoral community of Vaud-based actors. It also manages the regional portal vaud.ch and promotes local products under the 'VAUD CERTIFIÉ D'ICI' label.

Industry: Regional Economic & Tourism Promotion
Address: Canton de Vaud, Switzerland

Attack summary

Severity: high — Data has been confirmed as published by the threat actor against a quasi-governmental regional promotion body that likely holds business partner PII, economic intelligence, and institutional data. The published status elevates this beyond a mere listing, and the semi-public/governmental nature of the organisation increases the sensitivity of the exposure.

The Darkrace ransomware group claims to have compromised Vaud Promotion and has published data (disclosed status: data_published), though the leak post does not specify the volume of data exfiltrated or whether encryption was also performed.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Internal organisational documents
Member and partner records
Economic promotion data
Tourism and event information
Potentially staff and contact information

What the group claims

L’Association Vaud Promotion a pour but d’accroître la notoriété, la compétitivité et l’attractivité du canton de Vaud au moyen de la marque VAUD+ dont elle promeut les valeurs. Elle entend réaliser son but en collaboration avec les acteurs économiques, régions et institutions participant à la promotion du canton de Vaud, à travers les activités, produits et services qui en font le succès, qu’ils soient économiques, académiques, touristiques, culturels, sportifs, issus du terroir vaudois et gastronomiques.A cet effet, elle anime une communauté d’acteurs multisectoriels vaudois qui incarnent et véhiculent les valeurs de la marque VAUD+.

Sources

Victim sitevaud.ch
Leak posthttp://wkrlpub5k52rjigwxfm6m7ogid55kamgc5azxlq7zjgaopv33tgx2sqd.onion/fee884bc2398/

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.

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Disclosure context

About Darkrace

Darkrace is a relatively new ransomware group that emerged in May 2023, operating with primarily financial motivations through targeted extortion campaigns. The group demonstrates a preference for targeting European nations, particularly Italy, Sweden, and Portugal, while also conducting operations against victims in Japan and Switzerland, suggesting a broad international scope despite their limited scale of operations. With only 10 documented victims since their emergence, Darkrace appears to operate as a smaller, independent ransomware operation rather than a large-scale Ransomware-as-a-Service enterprise, though specific details regarding their country of origin and potential affiliations with other cybercriminal groups remain undocumented in public threat intelligence reporting. Due to the limited public documentation from major cybersecurity firms and law enforcement agencies regarding Darkrace's specific attack methodologies, encryption techniques, and initial access vectors, their operational tactics and technical capabilities are not well-established in current threat intelligence databases. The group has not been associated with any major, high-profile ransomware incidents that have drawn significant public attention or law enforcement response, likely due to their relatively small victim count and recent emergence in the threat landscape. Current intelligence suggests Darkrace remains active as of late 2023, though their limited operational footprint and absence from major cybersecurity advisories indicates they represent a lower-tier threat compared to more established ransomware operations. The group has been linked to 10 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on May 31, 2023; most recent post June 9, 2023. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

June 7, 2023vaud-promotion listed by Darkraceon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Darkrace

Darkrace has been linked to 10 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Darkrace dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Government sector, which has 685 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, vaud-promotion is reported in Switzerland, a country with 154 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Darkrace means vaud-promotion 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, NCSC-CH (Switzerland), as required for your jurisdiction.
Monitor for the data appearing on Darkrace'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.