Was Riley Pope & Laney hit by ransomware?

Riley Pope & Laney was listed by the Cicada3301 ransomware operation (United States), and stolen data was published on the group's leak site. Darkfield tracks this disclosure with the original leak post, screenshot and group context.

Who is the Cicada3301 ransomware group?

Cicada3301 is a ransomware operator tracked by Darkfield. See the full operator dossier for its known victims, sectors targeted, IOCs and leak-site infrastructure.

What data was leaked in the Riley Pope & Laney breach?

Cicada3301 published data attributed to Riley Pope & Laney. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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Riley Pope & Laney

Claimed by Cicada3301 · listed 2 years ago

23m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedAug 14, 2024
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Cicada3301
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Business Services
Listed on leak site: Aug 14, 2024

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Riley Pope & Laney is a full-service law firm founded in 2001 with offices in South Carolina and North Carolina. The firm provides legal counsel in banking, financial services, real estate, litigation, intellectual property, government relations, and commercial transactions to business and financial clients throughout the Carolinas.

Industry: Legal Services - Business & Financial Law
Address: 2838 Devine Street, Columbia, SC 29205; 105 Reed Avenue, Lexington, SC 29072; Charlotte, NC
Employees: 51-200
Founded: 2001

Attack summary

Severity: medium — Law firm breach with potential access to privileged attorney-client communications and sensitive client financial/business data. However, no specific proof files advertised, data inventory not detailed, and no operational impact stated. Sensitivity is elevated due to legal practice nature but lacks confirmation of actual exfiltration scale.

Cicada3301 claims to have compromised Riley Pope & Laney and published data. The post contains no specific claims about encryption, exfiltration method, or data categories beyond implying access to firm systems.

medium

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Client files and communications
Legal documents
Financial records
Firm administrative data

What the group claims

Riley Pope & Laney was founded in 2001 by Ted Riley, Lowndes Pope and Roy Laney. Since its founding, our firm has continually grown and we now have offices in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia providing legal counsel in the areas of banking and financial services, real estate transactions and litigation, business and defense litigation, commercial transactions, technology, and all manners of intellectual property to include patent, trademark, copyright and trade secret law. We practice in all state and federal courts in North and South Carolina and Georgia, the United States Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and the United States Supreme Court. Our practical approach enables us to effectively and efficiently resolve your issues. With a unique understanding of state government processes and complex public policy initiatives, our firm is ideally suited to provide strategic counsel and legislative representation for clients before the South Carolina General Assembly, Governor’s Office, state agencies and local governments.

Sources

Victim siterplfirm.com
Leak posthttp://cicadabv7vicyvgz5khl7v2x5yygcgow7ryy6yppwmxii4eoobdaztqd.onion/7e106qyi61nf7uotif1e2hseny4zpwji

Source

Indexed 2 years ago

This page surfaces a public ransomware disclosure indexed by Darkfield. Original posts come from the operator's own leak site; we cross-check against ransomware.live, RansomLook and RansomWatch where applicable. Share this URL freely.

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Disclosure context

About Cicada3301

Cicada3301 is a recently emerged ransomware group that began operations in June 2024, primarily motivated by financial gain through extortion activities targeting organizations across multiple sectors. The group's origin and affiliations remain largely undocumented in public threat intelligence reporting, with limited information available regarding their operational structure or potential connections to other cybercriminal organizations. Based on observed targeting patterns, Cicada3301 has demonstrated a preference for attacking business services, technology, manufacturing, and financial sector organizations, with their operations concentrated primarily in English-speaking countries including the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, as well as extending to Spain and Singapore. The group has successfully compromised approximately 75 known victims since their emergence, though specific details regarding their attack methodologies, initial access vectors, encryption techniques, and extortion tactics have not been extensively documented in publicly available threat intelligence reports from major cybersecurity firms or government agencies. Given the limited public documentation available from CISA, FBI, Mandiant, or other reputable security researchers, the group's current operational status, technical capabilities, and specific attack infrastructure remain largely uncharacterized in open-source intelligence reporting. As of the most recent observations, Cicada3301 appears to remain active in conducting ransomware operations, though comprehensive analysis of their tactics, techniques, and procedures awaits more detailed public reporting from established threat intelligence sources. The group has been linked to 75 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on June 20, 2024; most recent post September 4, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

August 14, 2024Riley Pope & Laney listed by Cicada3301on the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Cicada3301

Cicada3301 has been linked to 75 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Cicada3301 dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Business Services sector, which has 3,796 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Riley Pope & Laney is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Cicada3301 means Riley Pope & Laney appeared on a ransomware extortion site and data attributed to it has been published. If this is your organisation, or a supplier you depend on, the priority is to confirm the intrusion and contain it before the window to act closes.

Engage your incident-response team and preserve forensic evidence before remediating — do not wipe affected systems first.
Force a password reset and revoke active sessions for exposed accounts; rotate any credentials, API keys or certificates that may have been in the stolen data.
Assess regulatory notification duties (GDPR, NIS2, sector regulators) — many carry a 72-hour reporting clock from awareness.
Report the incident to your national CERT, CISA (United States), as required for your jurisdiction.
Monitor for the data appearing on Cicada3301's leak site and across paste and breach channels, and brief downstream partners who may be exposed through you.

How we know this. Darkfield monitors public ransomware leak sites continuously, archiving every new disclosure and the data later released against the victim. Each entry on this page is sourced from the operator's own publication and cross-checked against complementary OSINT feeds (RansomLook, ransomware.live, RansomWatch). We do not collect or host stolen data — only the metadata, timestamps and screenshots needed to make the public disclosure searchable and accountable. Records here are corrected when the original post is edited, retracted, or merged with another disclosure.