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GLOBALMalwareManufacturingManufacturingRansomwareThegentlemenRansom DemandedActor NamedMedium

Ritz Safety LLC

bd_ce577cfb8bf8e4a0 · schema v1 · pii pii-v2

Severity

Medium

Discovered

Filed

Sep 7, 2026

To disclose

Affected

Not disclosed

Confidence

50%
Full breach record for Ritz Safety LLC

Threat-actor claim — not a regulatory filing

This row is a claim by the ransomware group Thegentlemen on its public extortion blog. It has not been validated by the victim or any regulator. Treat attribution and counts as the threat actor's assertion until a regulatory filing or victim disclosure corroborates them.

Group activity: ManufacturingDiscovered: 2026-09-07

Source: Ransomware.live

Post text · scraped from the leak site

ritzsafety.com zoominfo.com/c/ritz-safety-llc/82166398 Ritz Safety Americas largest privately-held PPE & safety equipment distributors — founded in 1983 in Pompano Beach, Florida by Emily Ritz and her son Peter Merkl, selling work boots and gloves from a truck, now HQ'd in Dayton, Ohio with ~220–250 employees and 17–18 locations nationwide. Hidden twist: in 2006 the family's uniform-rental empire Van Dyne Crotty was sold to Cintas — but the brothers Dan and Bob Crotty kept Ritz Safety out of the deal and built it into a roll-up consolidator: 9 acquisitions (2015–2022), 5,000+ customers monthly, access to 200,000+ SKUs, private-label lines, equipment rental/repair, custom embroidery and free on-site safety training. Revenue: $100–150M (2025: +12% = +$20M growth, best Q2 in the company's 42-year history), 100% family-owned (Crotty family), no PE. Bottom line: a family dynasty that lost its parent empire to Cintas but turned the "leftover" safety distributor into a new national powerhouse

Incident timeline — mostly unverified

? — ?

Breach window unknown

Sep 7, 2026

Claim posted

No filing yet · watching

Compliance clocks stay unassessable until a regulatory filing lands. Dashed segments fill in automatically when corroboration arrives.

Claim → filing

Compliance clock

Not assessable

Tracked as a single-filing incident — the only disclosure on record for this event so far.Unverified claimView incident

Evidence ladder

Leak-site claimThis record

Attacker assertion only. Establishes: claim date, group, alleged victim.

Press / market report

Unlocks: incident narrative, operational impact. Still no compliance clock.

State AG / regulator filing

Unlocks: discovery date, data types, affected count, compliance clock.

SEC 8-K / victim statement

Unlocks: materiality, stated response, full audit trail. Ceiling removed.

No regulatory filing corroborates this yet — it is the attacker's own assertion. Watch this entity to be notified the moment a filing corroborates or contradicts it.

Source ceiling

  • actor name
  • victim claim
  • ransom/leak status
  • discovery date
  • materiality
  • notification
  • affected count
  • confirmed data types
  • compliance clock

The ✕ fields stay blank until a regulatory filing or victim disclosure lands.

About this groupFirst seen 2023-02-28

thegentlemen

According to ransomware.live, The Gentlemen is a RaaS group that emerged in July–August 2025, rapidly claiming over 320 victims across 17+ countries by offering affiliates a 90% revenue share, deploying a Go-based locker against Windows, Linux, NAS, and BSD systems; a compromised C2 server in 2026 revealed more than 1,570 linked victims.

870 tracked hereFull profile →