Emperador Ransomware: New Extortion Group of 2026

Emperador is an extortion group that first appeared in August 2026. In September 2026 it posted 23 victims on its leak site (ransomware.live data), including Brazil's federal revenue agency, a Brazilian municipal government and a Swedish appliance manufacturer, and two organisations in India. Threat-intelligence trackers also list city governments in the Philippines.

Its posts claim stolen databases and customer records and demand payment to prevent publication. These are the group's own claims and have not been independently verified.

There is not yet enough public evidence to say whether Emperador runs its own encryptor, reuses another group's, or only steals data. If your systems were encrypted, the encryption itself tells you more than the group's name: identify the ransom note and the file extension, and measure how the files were encrypted before deciding anything.

If only data was stolen and nothing was encrypted, there is nothing to recover. The work is then incident response: closing the way in, assessing what was taken, and the legal and notification duties that follow.

Isolate the affected systems, but do not wipe, reinstall or "clean" anything yet, and do not run decryptors found online on your only copy. Keep the ransom note, a few encrypted files and, if you have them, unencrypted copies of the same files from before the attack: comparing the two shows exactly how the files were encrypted.

Then establish what is recoverable before deciding anything else: how much of each database, virtual disk and backup file was encrypted, and what the untouched parts still hold. Large files are often only partly encrypted, and that is where recovery without the key comes from.