INC Ransomware Group Holds Healthcare Hostage in Oceania

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Nate Nelson , Contributing Writer March 11, 2026 4 Min Read Source: JJ Gouin via Alamy Stock Photo Cybersecurity authorities in Oceania are warning that the INC ransomware operation has been ripping through healthcare organizations in the region. Healthcare — particularly 24/7 patient care facilities — has always been foremost among targets for ransomware actors, ever since they collectively decided that morality wasn't really their forte. INC embodies this trend, targeting the industry at a higher clip than almost any other ransomware group . In the last couple of years, it has spread those operations globally. On March 6, the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), the Kingdom of Tonga's National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT Tonga), and New Zealand's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) released a joint advisory about it. It ostensibly covered INC's "targeting of critical networks" in the region, but in practice focused almost entirely on its threat to this one sector. INC Incorporates Oceania Into its Targeting Related: Chinese Cyber Threat Lurks In Critical Asian Sectors for Years Sometimes, organized cybercrime outfits execute full frontal offensives in specific industry verticals or geographic regions, indicating forethought and a clear plan of attack. Last week's advisory paints a picture of a cybercrime outfit that initially had other plans, but gradually realized the opportunity in Oceania's healthcare sector over time. INC's initial focus was in the US and the UK, the authorities noted. Only a year or so into its run, in the summer of 2024, it began targeting Australian companies in the professional services and healthcare industries. That activity seems to have picked up steam in 2025, and expanded into neighboring New Zealand and Tonga. Tonga, in particular, suffered a significant attack at INC's hands, which caused disruptions to national health services. INC Incidents in Australia, New Zealand, and Tonga The ACSC responded to 11 INC ransomware attacks in Australia between July 2024 and December 2025, predominantly affecting either healthcare or professional services companies . Typically in these cases, the attackers got access to victims by purchasing compromised accounts from initial access brokers (IABs). With that said, INC has also been known to spear-phish some of its victims, and exploit known vulnerabilities in Internet-facing devices deployed by others. And because INC uses a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) business model, its tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) can vary depending on which affiliate is carrying out any given attack. With an initial foothold, the attackers have moved laterally within Aussie networks, escalating their privileges to the administrator level before deploying their locker and a ransom note. In some cases, they've also exfiltrated personally identifying information (PII) and protected health information (PHI). INC uses legitimate software programs to both compress data and help exfiltrate data from compromised networks. Related: LatAm Now Faces 2x More Cyberattacks Than US Compared to Australia, the advisory references more diffuse threats to New Zealand, with a variety of opportunistic actors impacting a variety of industries. INC joined the fray in May 2025, when it stole a large amount of data and encrypted a number of servers and endpoint devices at a healthcare organization, and later published the stolen data on its Dark Web leak site. In Tonga, INC skipped over individual facilities and went right for the nation's Ministry of Health (MoH). On June 15, 2025, it disrupted MoH information and communications networks, effectively shutting down core national services. "Attackers don’t scale by local size but by opportunity," Keeper Security CISO Shane Barney points out. "Smaller nations often rely on centralized, resource-constrained infrastructure, which can make them proportionally more vulnerable. They may not see the volume of attacks larger economies face, but even a single successful intrusion can have outsized impact, and incident response capacity may be more limited." Related: Indian APT 'Sloppy Lemming' Targets Defense, Critical Infrastructure Authorities have now identified a specific, named hacker behind the Tonga attack — Roman Khubov, known online as "blackod" — and published a picture of his face. Little is publicly known about Khubov beyond what's briefly stated in the advisory. Standard Mitigations Can Defeat Old TTPs Oceania cyber authorities recommended that organizations interested in defending against the INC ransomware group take appropriately basic cybersecurity precautions, like monitoring and restricting network traffic and remote access, implementing multifactor authentication (MFA) where applicable, and diligently managing software vulnerabilities. "INC is not employing new or cutting-edge tactics to compromise this industry, instead they are using what I refer to as legacy tactics to compromise organizations," says Christopher Hills, chief security strategist at BeyondTrust. "These threat actors are walking right into the environments with valid credentials. This just reinforces several points we have been talking about for years: verify everything, to every resource, control your threat landscape, patch vulnerable systems, stop exposing vulnerable system on the public Web." He thinks that "Groups like INC are exposing that fact that organizations, such as healthcare still haven't plugged common security gaps that most aren't thinking about because they are too hung up on the shiny new object known as artificial intelligence (AI)." Read more about: DR Global Asia Pacific About the Author Nate Nelson Contributing Writer Nate Nelson is a journalist and scriptwriter. He writes for "Darknet Diaries" — the most popular podcast in cybersecurity — and co-created the former Top 20 tech podcast "Malicious Life." Before joining Dark Reading, he was a reporter at Threatpost. 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