DLS / leak site
A ransomware group's "dedicated leak site": victim announcements, countdown timers and proof packs, published to convert embarrassment into payment.
Why it matters to you
Groups increasingly skip encryption and go straight to extortion-by-publication. Monitoring leak sites is now table stakes for breach detection.
Where we meet it
We capture entries as they appear and keep them after the crew pulls them, and a pulled entry is itself a signal, because it usually means negotiation has started.
Connected terms
Proof pack
The sample of stolen files a ransomware crew publishes or shows a victim to prove the breach is real: file trees, contracts, ID scans, released ahead of the full dump.
Partnerka
An affiliate program: the franchise model behind ransomware and stealer operations. The operator supplies malware and infrastructure; affiliates supply victims and split the revenue.
Initial Access Broker (IAB)
A specialist who breaks into organizations and sells the access (VPN, RDP, domain admin) instead of using it. The wholesale layer between opportunistic infection and targeted ransomware.
Double extortion
Steal the data first, encrypt second, and charge for both: one price to decrypt, another not to publish. Increasingly the theft alone, with no encryption at all, because publication is the half that forces payment.
Onion mirror
The Tor address a leak site or market publishes alongside its clear-web one, so that seizing a domain does not remove the service. Usually several, listed together, rotated as they are found.
Read elsewhere
Where this term stops being vocabulary
Dragnet is where you watch it happen to you
Knowing the word is the cheap half. The platform is the half where the term arrives attached to your domain, with a timestamp and the source it came from.
More from the playbook
Adversary-in-the-middle phishing
A phishing page that proxies the real login instead of imitating it. The victim authenticates against the genuine site through the attacker's server, completes multi-factor as normal, and the attacker keeps the resulting session cookie.
Business Email Compromise (BEC)
Fraud committed from inside a real mailbox: the attacker reads the thread, waits for an invoice and answers it with different bank details. No malware, no attachment, nothing for a scanner to find.
Callback phishing
An email that carries no link and no attachment, only a plausible invoice or subscription notice and a phone number to dispute it. The attack begins when the victim calls, and the person who answers walks them into installing remote access software.
Checker
A tool that tests stolen credentials against a target service in bulk and sorts the live ones from the dead. The industrialized step between a combolist and an account takeover.