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

September 26, 2023CannonDesign listed by Dunghill_Leakon the group's public leak site

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Construction sector, which has 415 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, CannonDesign is reported in United States, a country with 7,392 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

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.

Ransomware victim disclosure

← All victims

CannonDesign

Claimed by Dunghill_Leak · listed 3 years ago

32m

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

Listed
Sep 26, 2023
Data leaked

At a glance

Group: Dunghill_Leak
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Construction
Listed on leak site: Sep 26, 2023

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

CannonDesign is a global architecture, engineering, and consulting firm headquartered in the United States. The firm serves a broad range of project types including hospitals, higher education facilities, corporate offices, sports venues, and science and research buildings. It has been recognized by Fast Company as one of the 10 most innovative architecture firms in the world in 2017 and 2019.

Industry: Architecture, Engineering & Consulting
Employees: 1001-5000

Attack summary

Severity: high — Data has been confirmed as published by the threat actor. CannonDesign works extensively with hospitals, government, and higher education clients, meaning exfiltrated data likely includes sensitive project information and potentially regulated client data at significant scale.

Dunghill_Leak claims to have exfiltrated data from CannonDesign and has published the data on their leak site. The post does not specify encryption but the disclosed status indicates data has been published.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

Architecture and engineering project files
Corporate business data
Client records
Internal documents

What the group claims

CannonDesign is a global architecture, engineering and consulting practice that provides services for a range of project types, including hospitals and medical centers, corporate headquarters and commercial office buildings, higher education and PK-12 education facilities, hotels and hospitality, mixed-use, sports facilities, and science and research buildings. In 2017 and 2019, Fast Company named CannonDesign one of the 10 most innovative architecture firms in the world.

Sources

Victim sitecannondesign.com

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.