Embargo

What a claim is, and is not

A claim is a ransomware gang naming an organisation on its leak site, usually to pressure it into paying. It is the gang’s word: some claims are false, recycled from older breaches or exaggerated, and a claim says nothing about whose personal data, if any, was taken. That is why we count claims but do not list the organisations, and why a breach goes on the tracker as confirmed only when the organisation or a regulator says so.

How this is counted

Claims as collected from the gangs’ leak sites by ransomware.live, which says itself that they are unverified. We read its list every day and keep only counts: by month, by the victim’s country and by sector (as ransomware.live classifies them). Matches with official notices are by the organisation’s name, from 30 days before the claim to a year after it, against California’s and Washington’s full breach registers and every official notice on the tracker. A match is not a confirmation rate: those registers only see breaches of their own residents, and names are written differently. We never link to or visit leak sites.

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