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Lakeland Community College

Claimed by Maze · listed 6 years ago

78m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedJan 28, 2020
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Maze
Status
Data leaked
Country
United States
Sector
Education Facilities
Listed on leak site
Jan 28, 2020

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Lakeland Community College is a public two-year community college located in Kirtland, Ohio. It offers associate degrees, certificates, bachelor's and graduate degree partnerships, continuing education, and workforce development programs. The college serves the Lake County region and surrounding northeast Ohio communities.

Industry
Community College / Higher Education
Address
7700 Clocktower Drive, Kirtland, Ohio 44094, United States
Employees
201-500
Founded
1967

Attack summary

Severity: high — Data has been confirmed published by the Maze group against an educational institution, which likely holds significant volumes of student and staff PII including financial aid records. The data_published status indicates confirmed exfiltration and public release, elevating severity beyond medium despite no quantified data size.

The Maze ransomware group claims to have attacked Lakeland Community College and the disclosure status is listed as data_published, indicating that exfiltrated data was released publicly. No specific details about the volume or nature of the published data are available from the captured leak post.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Student records
  • Employee/HR records
  • Financial aid data
  • Enrollment and registration data
  • Administrative documents
  • Personally identifiable information (PII)

Sources

Source

Indexed 6 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 Maze

Maze ransomware group emerged in October 2019 as a financially motivated cybercriminal organization that pioneered the "double extortion" model, threatening to publicly leak stolen victim data if ransom demands were not met. The group is believed to have originated from Russia or Eastern Europe based on their operational patterns and was suspected of having connections to the earlier Chacha ransomware, operating as an independent group rather than a ransomware-as-a-service model. Maze operators primarily gained initial access through exploit kits, RDP brute force attacks, and spear-phishing campaigns, utilizing tools like Cobalt Strike for lateral movement and typically exfiltrating sensitive data before deploying their custom ransomware that used a combination of RSA and ChaCha20 encryption algorithms. The group became notorious for high-profile attacks against major organizations including Cognizant, Xerox, LG Electronics, and several healthcare systems during the COVID-19 pandemic, with ransom demands often reaching millions of dollars and their leak site regularly publishing stolen data from non-paying victims. Maze officially announced their retirement in November 2020, claiming they were ceasing operations and transferring some of their affiliates to other ransomware operations like Egregor. The group has been linked to 59 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on October 21, 2019; most recent post September 11, 2020. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • January 28, 2020Lakeland Community College listed by Mazeon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Maze

Maze has been linked to 59 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Maze dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Education Facilities sector, which has 27 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Lakeland Community College is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Maze means Lakeland Community College 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 Maze'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.