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Ransomware victim disclosure

All victims

Sills & Betteridge Solicitors

listed as sillslegal · Claimed by Alphv · listed 3 years ago

32m
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedNov 27, 2023
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Alphv
Status
Data leaked
Listed on leak site
Nov 27, 2023

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Sills & Betteridge is a regional law firm operating across the East Midlands, Yorkshire, and Lincolnshire with 16+ office locations. They provide personal and commercial legal services including residential conveyancing, family law, wills and probate, personal injury, employment law, and commercial litigation to local and national clients.

Industry
Legal Services - Solicitors & Attorneys
Address
Multiple offices: Lincoln, Nottingham, Boston, Sleaford, Gainsborough, Scunthorpe, Doncaster, Sheffield, Thorne, Howden, Wath Upon Dearne, Bawtry, Grimsby, Northampton, Skegness, Spilsby (UK)

Attack summary

Severity: low — No proof files, screenshots, or data samples are advertised. The post contains only generic firm marketing text from the public website with no evidence of actual compromise, exfiltration, or operational impact. Disclosure status is 'data_published' but no actual data is visible or described.

ALPHV claims to have compromised Sills & Betteridge Solicitors' systems. The leak post contains only marketing material from the firm's public website with no specific claims about data exfiltration or encryption.

low

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • Client records
  • Legal transaction files
  • Financial documents
  • Personal identification information

What the group claims

If you require assistance with a residential property transaction then Sills & Betteridge Solicitors are the firm to contact. We are one of the region’s largest law firms with Conveyancing teams across our office network in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and the East Midlands. Each of the teams comprises highly trained and experienced property solicitors and lawyers. From our offices in Lincoln, Nottingham, Boston, Sleaford, Gainsborough, Scunthorpe, Doncaster, Sheffield, Thorne, Howden, Wath Upon Dearne, Bawtry, Grimsby, Northampton, Skegness and Spilsby the teams are able to offer legal advice in all residential property matters to both local and national clients. We operate a dedicated computerised system of working which enables us to handle your transaction speedily, efficiently and cost effectively. You can rely on us to give you expert and impartial advice on the full range of issues arising from your property matters.

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 alphv

ALPHV, also known as BlackCat or Noberus, is a financially motivated ransomware group that emerged in September 2021 and rapidly established itself as one of the most sophisticated and prolific ransomware operations observed by researchers at Mandiant, CISA, and the FBI. The group is suspected to have Russian-speaking origins and operates as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) platform, with well-documented links to former affiliates of the DarkSide and BlackMatter ransomware operations, suggesting a continuity of personnel and tradecraft across these successive rebrand events. ALPHV is technically distinguished by its use of Rust-based ransomware — an uncommon choice at the time of its emergence — which enabled cross-platform attacks against Windows, Linux, and VMware ESXi environments; the group employs multiple initial access vectors including compromised credentials, phishing, and exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities, and routinely conducts double and triple extortion by exfiltrating sensitive data prior to encryption and threatening victims with public disclosure on their dedicated leak site, with some cases involving additional pressure through direct contact with victim customers and regulators. ALPHV has claimed responsibility for high-profile attacks against MGM Resorts International, Caesars Entertainment, Reddit, and healthcare provider Change Healthcare — the latter representing one of the most disruptive cyberattacks on the U.S. healthcare sector on record, with a reported ransom payment of approximately $22 million — and has accumulated over 731 known victims across the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Germany, with particular concentration in business services, manufacturing, healthcare, technology, and financial services sectors. In December 2023, the FBI and international partners conducted a disruption operation against ALPHV's infrastructure and released a decryption tool for victims; however, the group subsequently attempted to rebrand and continued operations before an apparent final collapse in March 2024, following an alleged exit scam against affiliates after the Change Healthcare ransom payment, with law enforcement officially attributing the group's infrastructure seizure shortly thereafter. The group has been linked to 731 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on September 9, 2021; most recent post March 3, 2024. The operation is currently inactive.

Also tracked as: BlackCat, Noberus.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • November 27, 2023sillslegal listed by alphvon the group's public leak site

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Business Services sector, which has 3,796 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, sillslegal is reported in United Kingdom, a country with 373 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by alphv means sillslegal 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 alphv'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.