Was Linney hit by ransomware?

Linney was listed by the Dunghill_Leak ransomware operation (United Kingdom), 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 Dunghill_Leak ransomware group?

Dunghill_Leak 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 Linney breach?

Dunghill_Leak published data attributed to Linney. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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Linney

Claimed by Dunghill_Leak · listed 1 year ago

14m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedApr 27, 2025
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Dunghill_Leak
Status: Data leaked
Country: United Kingdom
Listed on leak site: Apr 27, 2025

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Linney is a sixth-generation marketing services group founded in 1851, headquartered in Mansfield, UK. They provide integrated creative and marketing solutions including graphic design, brand strategy, copywriting, social media, web design, video production, and analytics. The company serves major clients across retail, FMCG, beauty, hospitality, and other sectors, including long-term work with McDonald's.

Industry: Marketing Services & Creative Agency
Address: Adamsway, Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, NG18 4FW, United Kingdom
Founded: 1851

Attack summary

Severity: medium — Confirmed data exfiltration from a major marketing agency with access to sensitive client campaigns and strategic information (McDonald's and Starbucks work mentioned). Data appears business-focused rather than personal PII at scale, but exposure of marketing strategy and client work for Fortune 500 companies is significant. Proof count not stated.

Dunghill_Leak claims to have breached Linney and exfiltrated data. The post references upcoming Starbucks campaign planning and suggests access to client work and potentially sensitive marketing materials, though specific data categories are not detailed in the available excerpts.

medium

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Marketing campaign plans
Client project files
Strategic business information
Campaign data for major brands

What the group claims

Linney is a sixth generation, world-class, multichannel marketing services group. It offers graphic design, brand strategy, copywriting, social media campaigns, website design and build, data analysis, content scheduling, prototyping, eCommerce integrations, film editing and video production, reporting and analytics, and other solutions. For more than a decade, Linney has produced and managed marketing campaigns within McDonald's restaurants. The company is currently preparing a marketing campaign for Starbucks in the spring of 2025.

Sources

Victim sitelinney.com

Source

Indexed 1 year 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 Dunghill_Leak

Dunghill_Leak is a relatively obscure ransomware operation that emerged in April 2023, primarily motivated by financial gain through extortion activities targeting small to medium-sized organizations. The group's country of origin and potential affiliations with other cybercriminal organizations remain unknown due to limited public reporting from major threat intelligence firms and law enforcement agencies. Based on their targeting patterns, the group appears to focus on opportunistic attacks against businesses in English-speaking countries, particularly the United Kingdom, Canada, and United States, as well as expanding operations into South American markets including Brazil and Bolivia, with a preference for victims in business services and technology sectors. With only 16 documented victims since their emergence, Dunghill_Leak operates as a smaller-scale ransomware group compared to major threat actors, and specific details about their attack methodologies, initial access vectors, encryption techniques, or whether they employ double extortion tactics have not been extensively documented in publicly available threat intelligence reports. The group's current operational status remains unclear, as limited public information prevents a comprehensive assessment of their ongoing activities or potential law enforcement disruption efforts. 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

April 27, 2025Linney listed by Dunghill_Leakon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Dunghill_Leak

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

See the full Dunghill_Leak dossier →

Sector and geography

Geographically, Linney is reported in United Kingdom, a country with 1,217 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Dunghill_Leak means Linney 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_Leak'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.