Skip to main content
Darkfield

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

Go-Ahead Group

Claimed by Dunghill · listed 3 years ago

34m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedSep 26, 2023
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Dunghill
Status
Data leaked
Country
United Kingdom
Sector
Transportation & Logistics
Listed on leak site
Sep 26, 2023

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Go-Ahead Group plc is a leading international public transport company headquartered in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. It operates bus and rail services across the UK, Ireland, Singapore, the Nordics, and Australia, delivering approximately 1 billion annual journeys with a fleet of around 7,000 buses and 27,000 employees. The group also has interests in ground handling services at British airports and is actively expanding into new markets including Australia.

Industry
Public Passenger Transport (Bus & Rail)
Address
3 Newbridge Square, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8AD, United Kingdom
Employees
27000
Founded
1987

Attack summary

Severity: high — Data has been confirmed as published by the threat actor against a major public transport operator serving millions of passengers across multiple countries, with likely exposure of employee PII, financial data, and government contract information. The scale of the organisation (27,000 employees, multi-national operations) and public-interest nature of the sector elevates severity, though absence of confirmed regulated medical or defence data prevents a critical rating.

The Dunghill ransomware group claims to have conducted an attack on Go-Ahead Group resulting in data publication ('data_published' status), indicating exfiltration of company data. No ransom amount or specific data volume was stated, but the disclosure implies sensitive corporate and operational data has been leaked.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Corporate operational data
  • Employee records
  • Financial records
  • Transport service contracts
  • Government and public sector partnership documentation
  • Personally identifiable information (staff/passengers potentially)

What the group claims

Go-Ahead Group plc is a passenger transport company based in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. The majority of its operations are within the United Kingdom, Ireland, Singapore, Norway, and Germany. Go-Ahead diversified into ground handling services at various British airports via the acquisition of Gatwick Handling International, British Midland, and Reed Aviation. Acquired numerous other British transport companies, including Thames Travel, Carousel Buses, Hedingham, Anglian Bus, and HC Chambers & Son. It was contracted to operate bus and rail services in Germany and Singapore. During January 2023, it was announced that Go-Ahead was expanding into the Australian market via the U-Go Mobility joint venture with the engineering company UFL.

Sources

Source

Indexed 3 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.

Is this your supplier? Your competitor? You?

Pro plans monitor your domain, corporate emails, and crypto wallets across every new ransomware leak-site post, breach dump and Telegram callout — alerts within 5 minutes.

Disclosure context

About dunghill

The dunghill ransomware group is a relatively new financially-motivated cybercriminal operation that emerged in April 2023, with documented attacks against 16 victims across multiple countries and sectors. Based on limited public reporting, the group's origin and affiliations remain unclear, though their targeting patterns suggest they operate as an independent entity rather than a established ransomware-as-a-service operation. The group has demonstrated a preference for targeting business services and technology sectors, with attacks documented across the United Kingdom, United States, Brazil, Bolivia, and Taiwan, indicating either a broad opportunistic approach or the use of initial access brokers to expand their geographic reach. While specific technical details about their attack methodology, encryption techniques, and extortion tactics have not been extensively documented in public threat intelligence reports, their multi-country victim distribution suggests they employ common initial access vectors such as phishing, credential theft, or exploitation of internet-facing vulnerabilities. No major high-profile attacks or significant law enforcement actions against the dunghill group have been publicly reported, likely due to their recent emergence and relatively small victim count compared to more established ransomware operations. As of current reporting, the group appears to remain active with limited public visibility into their operations. The group has been linked to 16 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on April 10, 2023; most recent post July 1, 2025. The operation is currently inactive.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • September 26, 2023Go-Ahead Group listed by dunghillon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by dunghill

dunghill has been linked to 16 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full dunghill dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Transportation & Logistics sector, which has 180 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Go-Ahead Group is reported in United Kingdom, a country with 1,217 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by dunghill means Go-Ahead Group 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, NCSC (United Kingdom), as required for your jurisdiction.
  • Monitor for the data appearing on dunghill'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.