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NorthWest Handling Systems

Claimed by Aurora · listed 2 months ago

2m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedMay 12, 2026
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Aurora
Status
Data leaked
Country
Canada
Sector
Transportation/Logistics
Listed on leak site
May 12, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

NorthWest Handling Systems is a forklift and warehouse equipment company headquartered in Renton, Washington, with approximately 55 years of operating history and branch locations across Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. The company provides material-handling equipment sales, service, and related solutions to a range of commercial and government clients including USPS, Oregon DHS, public schools, Nike, Google, Costco, and Umpqua Bank. It operates as a government contractor on certified payroll projects in addition to its private-sector business.

Industry
Forklift & Warehouse Equipment Sales and Service
Address
Renton, Washington, USA (with branches across WA, OR, and AK)
Founded
1969

Attack summary

Severity: critical — The published data includes plaintext credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, taxpayer IDs, government-contract payroll records (constituting regulated PII at scale), multi-year third-party credential sets enabling fraudulent access to Fortune 50 vendor systems, corporate banking credentials, and physical security layouts for ~50–200 named companies including Nike, Google, and Costco. This combination of regulated financial and personal data, third-party credential compromise, and sensitiv

The Aurora ransomware group claims to have exfiltrated the entire corporate file share of NorthWest Handling Systems, comprising 337,000+ files dating back to 1988, and has published the data. The dump reportedly contains plaintext credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, taxpayer IDs, third-party vendor portal credentials, customer facility CAD drawings, corporate banking details, and employee personal and payroll records.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Plaintext credit card numbers (Excel spreadsheet)
  • Social Security numbers (W-9 forms)
  • Taxpayer IDs (certified payroll documents)
  • Government contract payroll records (USPS, Oregon DHS, public schools)
  • Target Corporation vendor portal credentials (plaintext, multi-year)
  • Home Depot Maximo DC billing credentials (plaintext)
  • Albertsons/Safeway Corrigo portal credentials (plaintext)
  • Customer warehouse CAD files (facility layouts, security zones, fire-protection drawings)
  • Fixed-asset inventory data (24,669 rows, ExportFile.csv)
  • Corporate bank routing and account numbers (ACH authorization forms)
  • Employee direct-deposit details
  • Employee time cards
  • Employee disciplinary records
  • Accident reports
  • Decades of invoices

What the group claims

[warehouse] NorthWest Handling Systems — a 55-year-old forklift and warehouse equipment company headquartered in Renton, Washington, with branches across WA, OR, and AK. The dump is the entire corporate file share going back to 1988. 337,000+ files spanning every branch, every department, every era of the company. It includes: Plaintext credit card numbers in an Excel spreadsheet literally titled “C.O.D. info (CREDIT CARD INFO).xlsx” — stored at the root of the file server, unencrypted, for years. Social Security numbers and Taxpayer IDs on W-9 forms and certified payroll documents for government-contract work (USPS, Oregon DHS, public schools). 3+ years of plaintext passwords for Target Corporation’s vendor portal (TARS), stored in Word documents titled “TARGET PASSWORD & SECURITY QUESTIONS.” Each password rotation was saved as a new file. Home Depot Maximo DC billing credentials — plaintext, in a Word document, enabling fraudulent invoicing against a Fortune 50 company. Albertsons/Safeway Corrigo facility-management portal credentials — again, plaintext in a .docx file. 33 GB of customer warehouse CAD files — facility layouts, equipment placement, security-zone dimensions, and fire-protection drawings for approximately 50–200 companies including Nike, Google, Costco, and Umpqua Bank. 24,669 rows of fixed-asset data in ExportFile.csv — the complete equipment inventory, revealing the company’s financial structure, depreciation schedules, and capital-investment history. Corporate bank routing and account numbers (ACH authorization forms), employee direct-deposit details, time cards, disciplinary records, accident reports, and decades of invoices.

Sources

Source

Indexed 2 months 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 aurora

Aurora is a recently emerged ransomware group first observed in April 2026, operating with apparent financial motivations through targeted attacks across multiple sectors. Given its recent emergence, limited public documentation exists regarding the group's specific country of origin or affiliations with established ransomware operations, though its targeting patterns suggest a professional operation potentially operating as an independent entity rather than a known Ransomware-as-a-Service model. The group has demonstrated a preference for attacking business-critical sectors including business services, consumer services, manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services, with documented attacks spanning the United States, Canada, the Maldives, and Great Britain, though specific initial access vectors and technical methodologies remain undocumented by major threat intelligence firms. With only seven known victims documented since April 2026, Aurora represents a relatively small-scale operation compared to established ransomware families, though its cross-sector targeting approach and international victim scope indicate deliberate selection criteria rather than opportunistic attacks. The group remains active as of current reporting, though the limited victim count and recent emergence suggest either a highly selective targeting approach or a nascent operation still developing its operational capabilities. The group has been linked to 21 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on April 29, 2026; most recent post June 30, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • May 12, 2026NorthWest Handling Systems listed by auroraon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by aurora

aurora has been linked to 21 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full aurora dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Transportation/Logistics sector, which has 1,081 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, NorthWest Handling Systems is reported in Canada, a country with 314 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by aurora means NorthWest Handling Systems 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, CCCS (Canada), as required for your jurisdiction.
  • Monitor for the data appearing on aurora'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.