The LockBit ransomware group listed India's National Aerospace Laboratories on its dark web extortion site on November 28, 2023. NAL is a state owned aerospace research institution founded in 1959 under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, and it works alongside the Indian Space Research Organisation, the Defence Research and Development Organisation and Hindustan Aeronautics on civil aircraft programs.
LockBit published eight documents it said came from the laboratory. TechCrunch, which reviewed the posting, described them as confidential letters, an employee's passport and other internal records. The Cyber Express reported that the group set a deadline of December 18, 2023 before it would release everything in its possession.
NAL's public website was unreachable at the time of the listing, though no authority confirmed that the outage was connected to the intrusion. The Cyber Express reported that the site appeared to be responding again shortly afterwards.
Neither NAL nor CSIR issued a public statement, and India's Computer Emergency Response Team did not respond to press inquiries. The volume of data taken, whether any systems were encrypted and whether a ransom was demanded all remained unverified as of early December 2023. The only material in the public domain was the small sample LockBit chose to publish.