Was Design-Aire Engineering, INC hit by ransomware?

Design-Aire Engineering, INC was listed by the Dark Project 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 Dark Project ransomware group?

Dark Project 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 Design-Aire Engineering, INC breach?

Dark Project published data attributed to Design-Aire Engineering, INC. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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Design-Aire Engineering, INC

Claimed by Dark Project · listed 3 hours ago

Today

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedAug 24, 2026
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Dark Project
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Manufacturing
Listed on leak site: Aug 24, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Design-Aire Engineering is a professional engineering firm based in Indianapolis, Indiana, specializing in mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and energy engineering services. The company operates from a single known office location and serves clients in the engineering and MEP sectors.

Industry: Mechanical, Electrical & Plumbing Engineering
Address: 2707 Rand Rd., Indianapolis, IN 46241

Attack summary

Severity: low — The leak post contains no substantive claim of data exfiltration, no proof files or screenshots, no encryption evidence, and no detail of what was accessed or compromised. The post appears to be a generic outreach solicitation rather than a credible disclosure.

Dark Project claims to have attacked Design-Aire Engineering. The leak post contains only a generic outreach message and does not specify what data was compromised, whether encryption or exfiltration occurred, or provide operational details of the attack.

low

What the group claims

About Design-Aire Engineering, INC Design-Aire Engineering specializes in mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and energy engineering services. They focus on providing innovative and sustainable solutions for their clients. The company serves a diverse range of clients, including those in the public and private sectors. With a commitment to green engineering practices, they aim to enhance energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. Design-Aire Engineering, INC has suffered a cyberattack on its service systems, resulting in the theft of approximately 377GB of sensitive data. The breached information includes employees' personal data and detailed architectural plans of clients' buildings.

The leak post

captured from the group's site

If you’re a journalist, blogger, or have access to corporate networks, we’d love to connect with you. For any inquiries or if you encounter issues with our website, feel free to reach out at the email provided.

Sources

Source

Indexed 3 hours 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 Dark Project

Dark Project is a ransomware group first observed in August 2026 with an apparent primary motivation of financial gain, based on its targeting profile and operational patterns consistent with other profit-driven ransomware actors. As of the time of this writing, no major cybersecurity organizations including CISA, the FBI, Mandiant, or other reputable threat intelligence firms have published detailed public reporting attributing Dark Project to a specific nation-state, threat actor cluster, or affiliated ransomware ecosystem, and it remains unclear whether the group operates as a Ransomware-as-a-Service platform or as an independent closed operation. Based on available victim telemetry, the group has claimed at least 18 known victims across a geographically diverse range of countries, with the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico, the Philippines, and Germany representing its most frequently targeted regions. Its sectoral focus spans manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, hospitality, and education, suggesting an opportunistic targeting methodology rather than a narrowly defined strategic focus, though the inclusion of healthcare and critical infrastructure-adjacent sectors such as transportation warrants continued monitoring. Due to the group's recent emergence and limited public documentation at this time, specific details regarding initial access vectors, encryption implementation, extortion tactics, and tooling remain unconfirmed by open-source intelligence sources, and analysts should treat any further claims with appropriate caution pending corroborating reporting from authoritative sources. Dark Project should be considered an emerging threat actor under active observation. The group has been linked to 31 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on August 5, 2026; most recent post August 24, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

August 24, 2026Design-Aire Engineering, INC listed by Dark Projecton the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Dark Project

Dark Project has been linked to 31 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Dark Project dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Manufacturing sector, which has 3,692 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Design-Aire Engineering, INC is reported in United States, a country with 3,164 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Dark Project means Design-Aire Engineering, INC 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 Dark Project'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.