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GLOBALMalwareManufacturingManufacturingRansomwareThegentlemenRansom DemandedActor NamedMedium

EDCON LTD

bd_ee9b271b0debffbe · schema v1 · pii pii-v2

Severity

Medium

Discovered

—

Filed

Sep 29, 2026

To disclose

—

Affected

Not disclosed

Confidence

50%
Full breach record for EDCON LTD →

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: 2026-09-30

Source: Ransomware.live

Post text · scraped from the leak site

edcon.co.za zoominfo.com/c/edcon/36900910 Edcon (roots from 1929, Johannesburg) was South Africa's largest non-food retailer — owner of iconic chains Edgars, Jet, CNA and Boardmans, with ~1,200 stores across Southern Africa, ~19,000 staff, revenue of R25+ billion and four million private-label credit cards. It was crippled by Bain Capital's 2007 leveraged buyout (~R25 billion), losing market share to discounters before COVID-19 lockdown wiped out R2 billion in sales and forced business rescue in April 2020. The group was then broken up: Jet was sold to The Foschini Group (~R480m), Edgars to Retailability (~R350m, 5,200 jobs saved), CNA and credit books to other buyers. The Edcon holding company itself no longer trades — edcon.co.za is now a business-rescue notice board where practitioners Marsden and Schapiro distribute sale proceeds to creditors (payments started September 2024, proceedings still open as of 2025).

Incident timeline — mostly unverified

? — ?

Breach window unknown

Sep 29, 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.

1,059 tracked hereFull profile →