Was KIRKLAND-AND-ELLIS.LLP hit by ransomware?

KIRKLAND-AND-ELLIS.LLP was listed by the clop 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 clop ransomware group?

clop 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 KIRKLAND-AND-ELLIS.LLP breach?

clop published data attributed to KIRKLAND-AND-ELLIS.LLP. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

Kirkland & Ellis LLP

listed as KIRKLAND-AND-ELLIS.LLP · Claimed by Clop · listed 2 hours ago

Today

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedSep 23, 2026
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Clop
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Professional Services
Listed on leak site: Sep 23, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Kirkland & Ellis LLP is a major international law firm headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, founded in 1909. One of the highest-grossing law firms globally, it specializes in private equity, mergers and acquisitions, litigation, restructuring, intellectual property, and tax law, serving corporate clients, financial institutions, and investment firms with offices across the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Industry: Legal Services – Corporate Law & M&A
Address: Chicago, Illinois, United States
Founded: 1909

Attack summary

Severity: high — Kirkland & Ellis is a top-tier law firm handling sensitive client matters (M&A, private equity, litigation). Confirmed data publication by a known ransomware group (CLOP) against a firm with access to privileged legal information, financial records, and trade secrets of major corporations represents significant exposure of business-critical and potentially regulated data.

The CLOP group claims to have compromised Kirkland & Ellis LLP. The group has published data from the breach; no specific details of encryption, exfiltration scope, or data types are stated in the available leak post excerpt.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Client confidential files
Legal documents
Corporate records

Original description

AI-summarised, not from the leak post

Kirkland & Ellis LLP is a major international law firm headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1909, it provides legal services across practice areas including private equity, mergers and acquisitions, litigation, restructuring, intellectual property, and tax law. It is one of the highest-grossing law firms globally, serving corporate clients, financial institutions, and investment firms, with offices across the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Sources

Source

Indexed 2 hours 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 clop

Clop (also stylized as "Cl0p") is a financially motivated ransomware group and cybercriminal enterprise that emerged in early 2020 as an evolution of the earlier CryptoMix ransomware family, operating primarily for monetary extortion against large enterprise targets. The group is widely assessed by Mandiant, CISA, and other reputable researchers to have ties to Russian-speaking cybercriminal actors, with some researchers linking their operations to the broader FIN11 threat cluster; they operate a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model while also conducting direct intrusion operations. Clop is particularly distinguished for its aggressive exploitation of zero-day and n-day vulnerabilities in managed file transfer (MFT) and enterprise software platforms as primary initial access vectors, most notably the exploitation of Accellion FTA (2020-2021), Fortra GoAnywhere MFT (CVE-2023-0669), and the MOVEit Transfer vulnerability (CVE-2023-34362) in 2023, and consistently employs double extortion tactics — exfiltrating sensitive data prior to or in lieu of encryption and threatening public disclosure on their dedicated leak site to coerce payment. Clop has been responsible for some of the most impactful ransomware campaigns on record, with their 2023 MOVEit exploitation campaign alone affecting over 1,000 organizations globally and impacting entities including Shell, the U.S. Department of Energy, British Airways, and numerous U.S. federal agencies, with the broader campaign representing one of the largest mass-exploitation events in ransomware history; Ukrainian law enforcement arrested six individuals linked to Clop operations in June 2021, though the group's core leadership is assessed to remain outside of effective law enforcement jurisdiction. As of the most recent publicly available intelligence, Clop remains active, continuing to leverage vulnerability exploitation campaigns against enterprise file transfer solutions and maintaining a victim count exceeding 1,250 known organizations, with consistent targeting concentrated in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany across technology, business services, manufacturing, and consumer services sectors. The group has been linked to 1,375 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on March 13, 2020; most recent post September 23, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Also tracked as: Cl0p.

Timeline of this disclosure

September 23, 2026KIRKLAND-AND-ELLIS.LLP listed by clop on the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by clop

clop has been linked to 1,375 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full clop dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Professional Services sector, which has 17 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, KIRKLAND-AND-ELLIS.LLP is reported in United States, a country with 3,167 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by clop means KIRKLAND-AND-ELLIS.LLP 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 clop'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.