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Merced City School District

Claimed by Losttrust · listed 3 years ago

34m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedSep 26, 2023
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Losttrust
Status
Data leaked
Country
United States
Sector
Education
Listed on leak site
Sep 26, 2023

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Merced City School District (MCSD) is a public K-12 school district located in Merced, California. It serves scholars across multiple elementary and middle schools, providing equitable access to high-quality instruction in inclusive environments. The district emphasizes academic achievement, critical thinking, and student resilience.

Industry
K-12 Public Education
Address
444 W 23rd St, Merced, CA 95340, United States
Employees
501-1000

Attack summary

Severity: critical — A K-12 school district handles large volumes of regulated data including minor students' PII protected under FERPA, potentially including health records, behavioral records, and financial aid information. The data_published status confirms exfiltration and public release of data concerning minors, which constitutes a critical-severity incident.

The LostTrust ransomware group claims to have attacked Merced City School District, with the disclosure status listed as data_published, indicating exfiltration and/or publication of stolen data. No ransom amount or specific data volume was stated in the post.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Student records
  • Staff personal information
  • Administrative documents
  • Potentially regulated educational data (FERPA-protected)

What the group claims

OUR MISSION All scholars are ensured equitable access to high quality instruction in environments that value and build from their unique talents. Guiding scholars toward mastery of academics, we build from our scholars talents to nurture their continuous academic achievement, critical-thinking skills, and develop the resiliency, perseverance and confidence necessary to excel in learning and life. Our District team provides positive, inclusive environments where all scholars feel safe, respected, and connected.

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.

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Disclosure context

About Losttrust

Losttrust is a relatively new ransomware group that emerged in September 2023, operating with apparent financial motivations and demonstrating a broad international targeting scope across multiple sectors. The group's origin and affiliations remain largely undocumented by major threat intelligence organizations, with limited public reporting from established security firms regarding their operational structure or potential ransomware-as-a-service connections. Based on available victim data, Losttrust appears to employ opportunistic targeting methods, having compromised 53 known victims across diverse geographic regions including the United States, Italy, Germany, Argentina, and India, with particular focus on education, legal services, media organizations, food and agriculture companies, and government entities. The specific attack methodologies, initial access vectors, encryption techniques, and extortion tactics employed by Losttrust have not been extensively documented in public threat intelligence reports from major security vendors or law enforcement agencies. Given the group's recent emergence and limited visibility in established threat intelligence channels, their current operational status and activity levels remain unclear, though the breadth of their reported victim base suggests ongoing operations as of recent observations. The group has been linked to 53 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on September 26, 2023. The operation is currently inactive.

Also tracked as: LOST TRUST.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • September 26, 2023Merced City School District listed by Losttruston the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Losttrust

Losttrust has been linked to 53 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Losttrust 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, Merced City School District is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Losttrust means Merced City School District 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 Losttrust'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.