Skip to main content
Darkfield

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

Highline Community College

Claimed by Qilin · listed 5 days ago

5d
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedJul 24, 2026
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Qilin
Status
Data leaked
Country
United States
Sector
Education
Listed on leak site
Jul 24, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Highline College is a public community college located in Federal Way, Washington, serving the greater Seattle metropolitan area. The institution offers associate degrees, bachelor's degrees, certificates, and continuing education programs across multiple disciplines including STEM, arts, design, and workforce development. It operates multiple campus locations and serves thousands of students annually.

Industry
Public Community College
Address
Federal Way, Washington, US
Employees
501-1000
Founded
1961

Attack summary

Severity: high — Educational institution with confirmed data_published status. Likely exfiltration of student PII, financial records, and enrollment data affecting potentially thousands of individuals. No proof count provided but disclosure status indicates publication occurred.

The Qilin ransomware group claims to have conducted an attack on Highline College with data exfiltration, though no specific details of the attack methodology or data categories are provided in the truncated leak post.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Student records
  • Financial aid information
  • Enrollment data
  • Employee records
  • Administrative systems data

What the group claims

N/A

Sources

Source

Indexed 5 days 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 Qilin

Qilin is a ransomware group that emerged in October 2022, operating with primarily financial motivations through targeted attacks against organizations across multiple sectors. The group appears to operate independently with limited public information available regarding their specific country of origin or affiliations to other ransomware families. Qilin employs double extortion tactics, typically exfiltrating sensitive data before deploying their encryption payload, though specific details about their initial access vectors and technical tools remain less documented in public security research. The group has demonstrated a broad targeting approach, with their 1645 known victims spanning multiple countries including the United States, France, Canada, United Kingdom, and Germany, with particular focus on manufacturing, technology, healthcare, and business services sectors. Based on available intelligence reporting, Qilin remains an active threat as of recent assessments, continuing their ransomware operations without significant reported law enforcement disruption. The group has been linked to 2,087 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on October 8, 2022; most recent post July 28, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • July 24, 2026Highline Community College listed by Qilinon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Qilin

Qilin has been linked to 2,087 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Qilin dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Education sector, which has 1,085 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Highline Community College is reported in United States, a country with 3,138 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Qilin means Highline 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 Qilin'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.