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BlackCat, also known as ALPHV, Noberus, and ALPHV-ng, was a Russian-speaking ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation active from November 2021 until its apparent shutdown in March 2024. It is widely assessed as part of the DarkSide–BlackMatter ransomware lineage. The operation supplied Rust-based ransomware for Windows and Linux/ESXi environments to affiliates and operated leak infrastructure to support extortion. BlackCat used encryption-led double extortion: affiliates stole data, encrypted victim systems, and threatened publication through a leak site. It also supported additional pressure tactics, including victim-specific extortion portals, telephone-based pressure, DDoS capability, and threats involving victims’ customers. BlackCat’s affiliate ecosystem conducted social engineering, malvertising, credential theft and abuse, remote-service access, credential stuffing, brute force, exploitation of exposed remote-management tooling, reconnaissance, network scanning, privilege escalation, lateral movement, and data exfiltration. Affiliates have used administrative tools and compromised domain accounts to distribute payloads at scale, while ExMatter was used to locate and exfiltrate targeted files. The ransomware was configurable and supported network discovery, self-propagation, service termination, shadow-copy deletion, event-log-clearing attempts, virtual-machine disruption, and ESXi snapshot deletion. Its payloads used hybrid encryption based on AES or ChaCha20 with RSA-protected keys. BlackCat targeted organizations globally, including healthcare providers and health-technology vendors, government-related organizations, financial-technology firms, hospitality businesses, logistics companies, technology organizations, and other enterprises. Prominent incidents linked to the ecosystem include the 2023 MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment intrusions and the 2024 Change Healthcare attack. Following disruption of its infrastructure and an apparent exit scam in March 2024, affiliates and victim data appeared to disperse to other ransomware operations. Reported links between BlackCat and later groups including RansomHub and Cicada3301 remain unconfirmed and should not be treated as definitive rebrands.
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Who, where, and (when attributed) which flag flies behind the operation. Pulled from open-source reporting and Mallory's analyst review.
Sectors the actor has been observed targeting.
Geographies tied to known operations.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
60 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
19 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
14 additional families tracked in Mallory.
3 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 3 of them exploited in the wild.
Scattered Spider is known to exploit CVE-2015-2291 which is a vulnerability in the Intel Ethernet diagnostics driver for Windows (iqvw64.sys) that allows local users to cause a denial of service or possibly execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges... Scattered Spider exploited CVE-2015-2291 to deploy a malicious kernel driver in the Intel Ethernet diagnostics driver for Windows (iqvw64.sys).
An analysis of ‘exp.exe’ indicated that it is a privilege escalation tool based on the exploitation of CVE-2022-24521 – a vulnerability in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) Driver, known to be used by several ransomware groups.
Kevin Beaumont suggested that HTC was breached as a result of the Citrix Bleed vulnerability. The article states it was published in mid-October and had been actively exploited since at least August, making it a zero-day vulnerability.
134 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
20 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Mentioned only as one of several ransomware families tied to Woodgnat/KongTuke.
Mentioned as a later rebrand/successor in the DarkSide lineage.
Named as one of multiple ransomware groups operating data leak sites and listing fresh victims.
Conducted the ransomware attack against Change Healthcare that resulted in theft of approximately 6 TB of sensitive data and extortion of UHG.
Match sector + geo + tech-stack targeting against your real footprint.
Every observed MITRE ATT&CK technique, grouped by tactic.
Families this actor is known to deploy, with IOCs and behavior.
CVEs this actor has used in known campaigns.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Domains, IPs, and hashes tied to this actor, refreshed continuously.