The Conti Leaks
When Conti's leadership publicly backed Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a sympathizer of the opposite view dumped two years of the gang's internal chats.
For two years, the Conti ransomware operation was one of the most prolific extortion machines on the internet, hitting hospitals, school districts, manufacturers, and at one point the entire government of Costa Rica. It ran like a company. It had HR, recruiters, salary disputes, and a Russian-speaking Jabber server humming with the daily traffic of more than a hundred employees.
A short statement, a long consequence
On the second day of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Conti's leadership posted an unambiguous pro-Russian statement on its leak site. The post promised retaliation against any Western entity targeting Russian critical infrastructure.
A Ukrainian member of the group reacted by exfiltrating the gang's internal chats — roughly two years of Jabber logs and source-code repositories — and leaking them in batches over the following weeks under the handle @ContiLeaks.
A field guide for defenders, paid for by the gang
The dumps were, in effect, the most detailed internal portrait of a major ransomware operation ever published. Researchers extracted org charts, salary ranges, money-laundering pipelines, attribution clues, and the gang's own analysis of which security products were easy or hard to evade. Conti rebranded, fragmented, and eventually wound down its main brand within months.
What the chronicle remembers
The Conti leaks were a rare opportunity to see ransomware not as faceless malware but as a workplace. Most of what defenders have learned about how modern extortion groups are organized — the affiliate model, the developer incentives, the way support tickets really worked — comes from a hard drive copied by an unhappy employee in early 2022.