Was Salford City College hit by ransomware?

Salford City College was listed by the Qilin 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 Qilin ransomware group?

Qilin 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 Salford City College breach?

Qilin published data attributed to Salford City College. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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Salford City College

Claimed by Qilin · listed 3 months ago

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedMar 10, 2026
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Qilin
Status: Data leaked
Country: United Kingdom
Sector: Education
Listed on leak site: Mar 10, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Salford City College is a further education college located in Salford, Greater Manchester, United Kingdom. It provides vocational, academic, and professional courses to post-16 students and adult learners. The college operates under the UK further education sector and is accessible via www.salfordcc.ac.uk.

Industry: Further Education

Attack summary

Severity: high — A confirmed data_published status against an educational institution likely involves PII of students and staff (names, addresses, financial records, potentially safeguarding data), which constitutes significant sensitive data exfiltration even without explicit proof files visible in the truncated post.

Qilin claims to have compromised Salford City College and lists the disclosure status as data_published, indicating exfiltration and publication of data; however, the leak post excerpt provided does not contain a specific entry or proof files directly attributed to Salford City College.

high

What the group claims

N/A

The leak post

captured from the group's site

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Sources

Source

Indexed 3 months 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 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 1,935 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on October 8, 2022; most recent post June 12, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

March 10, 2026Salford City College listed by Qilinon the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Qilin

Qilin has been linked to 1,935 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 694 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Salford City College is reported in United Kingdom, a country with 902 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Qilin means Salford City 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.
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.