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University of Illinois Chicago

Claimed by Booba Project · listed 2 hours ago

Today
Age
since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

  1. ListedOct 2, 2026
  2. Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group
Booba Project
Status
Data leaked
Country
United States
Sector
Education
Listed on leak site
Oct 2, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a public research university and the largest university in Chicago. It serves approximately 16,000 students across multiple campuses and offers undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs across engineering, medicine, business, and other disciplines.

Industry
Higher Education
Address
601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607, USA
Employees
16000
Founded
1946

Attack summary

Severity: high — Confirmed exfiltration of 344 GB from a major educational institution likely containing PII of thousands of students and staff, though specific data types and proof are not detailed in the available leak post.

Booba Project claims to have exfiltrated 344 GB of data from the University of Illinois Chicago. The leak post does not specify the nature of the exfiltrated data or confirm whether encryption was deployed.

high

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post
  • University records
  • Student information
  • Employee data

What the group claims

Higher Education Stolen data: 344 GB.

Sources

Source

Indexed 2 hours 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 Booba Project

Booba Project is a nascent ransomware group first observed in July 2026, operating with an apparent financial motivation based on its targeting patterns, though limited public documentation exists given its recent emergence and small victim footprint. The group has claimed or been attributed to at least four known victims, with activity concentrated in Spain and the United States, spanning sectors including telecommunications, agriculture and food production, and technology, suggesting opportunistic rather than highly targeted sector-specific campaigns. Due to the group's recency and limited victim count, no detailed technical analysis of their tooling, initial access vectors, encryption methodology, or extortion tactics has been publicly documented by CISA, the FBI, Mandiant, or other reputable threat intelligence sources at this time. No notable high-profile campaigns, record ransoms, or law enforcement actions have been publicly attributed to Booba Project as of the available reporting period. Given its first observation date of July 2026 and minimal public reporting, the group should be considered emergent and actively monitored, with its operational status, potential RaaS affiliation, and country of origin remaining unconfirmed pending further intelligence collection and disclosure by authoritative cybersecurity organizations. The group has been linked to 30 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on July 6, 2026; most recent post October 2, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

  • October 2, 2026University of Illinois Chicago listed by Booba Project on the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by Booba Project

Booba Project has been linked to 30 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full Booba Project dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Education sector, which has 1,087 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, University of Illinois Chicago is reported in United States, a country with 3,167 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by Booba Project means University of Illinois Chicago 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 Booba Project'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.