Was Vanderbilt University Medical Center hit by ransomware?

Vanderbilt University Medical Center was listed by the Meow 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 Meow ransomware group?

Meow 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 Vanderbilt University Medical Center breach?

Meow published data attributed to Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Claimed by Meow · listed 3 years ago

32m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedNov 24, 2023
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Meow
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Healthcare
Listed on leak site: Nov 24, 2023

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) is a major academic medical center located in Nashville, Tennessee, affiliated with Vanderbilt University. It operates multiple hospitals including Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt and provides a broad range of clinical, research, and educational services. VUMC is one of the largest healthcare employers in Tennessee and a nationally recognized research institution.

Industry: Academic Medical Center & Healthcare
Address: 1211 Medical Center Drive, Nashville, TN 37232
Employees: 10000+

Attack summary

Severity: critical — VUMC is a large academic medical center handling sensitive regulated health data at scale; the group claims full data publication (data_published status), which implies confirmed exfiltration of PHI/PII subject to HIPAA, affecting potentially hundreds of thousands of patients and employees.

The Meow ransomware group claims to have fully leaked data exfiltrated from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, with the disclosure status marked as data_published. No ransom amount was stated and no specific data volume was provided, but the post asserts 100% of the data has been leaked.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Patient records
Employee records
Medical research data
Personal health information (PHI)
Personally identifiable information (PII)

What the group claims

100% LEAKED

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 Meow

Meow is a relatively new ransomware group that emerged in November 2023, primarily motivated by financial gain through extortion activities targeting organizations across multiple sectors. The group has compromised at least 145 known victims in a short operational timeframe, demonstrating rapid scaling of their criminal enterprise. Based on their targeting patterns, Meow appears to focus heavily on English-speaking countries, with the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada representing their primary victim base, though they have also expanded operations to include targets in Italy and Colombia. The group shows a preference for attacking business services organizations, manufacturing companies, healthcare institutions, and agriculture and food production entities, suggesting they may employ broad-spectrum targeting rather than highly specialized sector focus. Their emergence in late 2023 and the significant victim count achieved in a relatively short period indicates either a sophisticated operation with experienced operators or potential links to existing ransomware ecosystems, though specific details about their attack methodology, initial access vectors, encryption techniques, or data exfiltration practices have not been extensively documented by major threat intelligence sources. Given the recent timeline of their emergence and limited public reporting from established security researchers, detailed technical analysis of their tools, tactics, and procedures remains sparse. The group appears to remain active as of current reporting, though comprehensive law enforcement actions or major disruption efforts have not been publicly documented. The group has been linked to 145 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on November 24, 2023; most recent post November 19, 2024. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

November 24, 2023Vanderbilt University Medical Center listed by Meowon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Meow

Meow has been linked to 145 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Meow dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Healthcare sector, which has 2,600 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Vanderbilt University Medical Center is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Meow means Vanderbilt University Medical Center 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 Meow'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.