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Bells Tax Service

Claimed by Blacklock · listed 1 year ago

25 Employees
Records
$5M
Ransom
demanded
14m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedMay 16, 2025
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Blacklock
Status
Data leaked
Country
United States
Sector
Financial Services
Listed on leak site
May 16, 2025
Records
25 Employees
Ransom demanded
$5M

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Bells Tax Service is a small accounting firm based in Modesto, California, offering tax preparation, bookkeeping, accounting, and corporate trust services to individuals, partnerships, and corporations.

Industry
Accounting & Tax Services
Address
Modesto, California, United States
Employees
<25

Attack summary

Severity: high — Confirmed exfiltration of tax and financial data (PII-sensitive at scale) from accounting firm serving multiple clients; published on leak site with operational encryption claimed.

Blacklock claims to have encrypted Bells Tax Service's systems and exfiltrated data. The group is demanding a $5M ransom and has published the victim listing.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Tax records
  • Client financial information
  • Accounting files
  • Corporate trust documents

What the group claims

Accounting Services · California, United States Bells Tax Service | Bells Tax Service Modesto California Modesto Tax Services Bells Tax Service modesto, tax, preparation, corporate, trusts... < 25 Employees Revenue < $5 Million

Sources

Source

Indexed 1 year 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 blacklock

Based on the limited publicly available information, Blacklock is an emerging ransomware group first observed in May 2025, operating with apparent financial motivations targeting organizations across multiple countries and sectors. The group's origin and potential affiliations remain unclear from documented sources, and there is insufficient public reporting to determine whether they operate as a Ransomware-as-a-Service model or as an independent entity. With 64 documented victims since their emergence, Blacklock has demonstrated a broad targeting approach across the United States, Canada, Spain, India, and the United Kingdom, with particular focus on technology, construction, manufacturing, and consumer services sectors, though their attack methodology, initial access vectors, and encryption tactics have not been extensively documented by major security research organizations. Due to the group's recent emergence and limited public reporting from established threat intelligence sources, notable campaigns and specific technical details of their operations remain largely undocumented in publicly available security research. As of current reporting, the group appears to remain active given their recent emergence date, though comprehensive analysis of their operational status requires additional documentation from established cybersecurity authorities. The group has been linked to 64 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on May 16, 2025; most recent post July 2, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • May 16, 2025Bells Tax Service listed by blacklockon the group's public leak site
Records
25 Employees
Ransom demanded
$5M

Other recent disclosures by blacklock

blacklock has been linked to 64 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full blacklock 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, Bells Tax Service is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by blacklock means Bells Tax Service 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 blacklock'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.