UK Ransomware in Q1 2026: 47 Confirmed Victims, 22 Groups, One Every 42 Hours

Ransomware.live tracks claims posted on dark web leak sites — the pages criminal groups use to publish victim names and stolen data when ransom negotiations fail or deadlines expire. It is not a complete record of UK ransomware incidents. Organisations that pay, or whose attackers choose not to publish, remain invisible. What the dataset provides is the most transparent available window into sustained criminal activity against UK targets across any given period.

In the first quarter of 2026, running from the 1st of January through to the 23rd of March (with the quarter not yet complete at the time of writing), ransomware.live recorded 47 confirmed UK victims. They were claimed by 22 distinct ransomware groups. That averages one published UK victim every 42 hours across the first eleven weeks of the year. The rate is consistent: 20 victims in January, 12 in February, and 15 in the first 23 days of March with eight days of the quarter still remaining.

Across those 47 claims, the data represents a cross-section of UK economic life that is wider and more surprising than most organisations assume when they think about who ransomware groups target. A national sports governing body. A university prion disease research unit. A family dairy operating since 1904. An employee-owned industrial pump manufacturer founded in 1901. A craft brewery in Nottinghamshire. Liverpool Philharmonic Hall. Two primary schools. A payment processor processing tens of millions of transactions globally. A plastic extrusion manufacturer in Derbyshire. Dozens of architects, engineers, solicitors, and quantity surveyors whose names will not appear in the press but whose data is now in criminal hands.

The Complete Q1 2026 UK Victim Record

January 2026 — 20 Victims Across 11 Groups

January opened with Purcell Architects (Akira, 5 January), a ~340-strong conservation and historic buildings practice, and Berkmann Wine Cellars (Qilin, 6 January), a major wine importer and distributor supplying the UK on-trade.

The 8th and 9th of January saw Beast claim two organisations in consecutive days: Richard Alibon Primary School in Barking and Collett Hulance, a chartered accountants practice in Bedford. Two days apart, same group, entirely different sectors. This is the Beast group's characteristic pattern: automated batch targeting rather than bespoke selection. Merit Group, a British publishing holding company, followed on the 14th, claimed by Sinobi.

Between the 15th and 17th, Qilin published three UK entries in three days: PSTECHLTD (a technology services firm), Dedman Gray Property Consultants (a UK real estate advisory), and Central Roofing South Wales (a construction contractor). Dragonforce added NWIMS IT Group, an IT managed services provider, on the 16th.

The 20th brought Sandberg (Incransom), one of the more historically notable January victims: an independent materials testing and geotechnical consultancy established in 1860 that had survived two world wars, the nationalisation era, and decades of structural change in UK construction. It did not survive an unmonitored network exposure in January 2026. PKT QS, a quantity surveying practice, was claimed the same day by Blackshrantac.

Between the 24th and 25th of January, the quarter's highest-volume day cluster occurred. On the 24th, Safepay published Interr, a security and risk management consultancy headquartered in East London, while Nightspire claimed Gianni Botsford Architects and Lesk Engineers Limited. On the 25th, Clop published three UK organisations simultaneously: Warranty First (vehicle warranties), BAQUS (professional services), and Trust Payments. The Trust Payments claim is the highest-profile single January entry. Trust Payments is a global payment service provider with approximately 500 staff and revenue in excess of £179 million, operating payment infrastructure across multiple markets. Three simultaneous Clop claims on the same day is consistent with Clop's batch exploitation model, in which a common vulnerability — in this case the Oracle E-Business Suite zero-day CVE-2025-61882 — provides access to multiple organisations whose data is then published in a single publication cycle as ransom deadlines expire together.

January closed with MRC Prion Unit and Institute of Prion Diseases at UCL (Crypto24, 24 January), Shaw Hill Primary School (Incransom, 27 January), and Urban Edge Architecture (Interlock, 29 January).

January by group: Qilin (5), Akira (2), Beast (2), Clop (3), Incransom (2), Nightspire (2), Interlock (1), Safepay (1), Sinobi (1), Genesis (1), Blackshrantac (1), Dragonforce (1), Crypto24 (1).

February 2026 — 12 Victims Across 9 Groups

February's volume was lower than January, but the profile of victims was in several cases higher. Stellium, a supply chain management consultancy, opened the month on the 1st (Everest). An unidentified organisation appeared as [Redacted] Ticket #1989 on the 4th (Anubis) — one of several Q1 claims where the victim's name has been deliberately obscured, suggesting active negotiation in progress. TriPartum, a small five-person customer communications business serving financial services clients, appeared on the 6th (Akira).

On the 7th, Clop published two further UK entries: Dukosi Limited, an Edinburgh-based EV battery management technology company, and Logical Micro, an IT services firm. Both are consistent with the October–November 2025 Oracle EBS exploitation campaign whose publication wave continued rolling into early 2026 as Clop's characteristically long delay between attack and publication played out.

Anchor Computer Systems appeared on the 12th (Qilin). Anchor provides software and technology services to the mortgage lending sector, with its platform used by over 300 lenders. A claim on Anchor is not bounded by Anchor's own data: it potentially exposes the operational infrastructure and client data of every lender running on its platform. A redacted Nightspire victim appeared on the 14th, their identity concealed behind asterisks, consistent with an active ransom negotiation.

The 16th and 17th brought the second Worldleaks double-strike of the period. Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce was published on the 16th, and Adelphi, a global pharmaceutical consultancy with over 700 staff, was published on the 17th with an estimated attack date of 11 February. Both claimed by the same group in a 24-hour window. Worldleaks, which emerged in January 2025 as a rebrand of Hunters International, operates a data-theft-only model — no encryption, just exfiltration and publication pressure. Yew Tree Dairy (Interlock, 16 February) also appeared on the 16th, a family dairy business that has been supplying dairy products since 1904. First 4 Recruitment appeared on the 18th (Beast), having been attacked in early January but published in February after its negotiation deadline expired.

February closed with Spire Payments on the 23rd (Qilin). Spire Payments is a UK fintech company that processes transactions for approximately 21 million payment devices and generates around £34 million in annual revenue. It sits in a network of payment infrastructure that touches thousands of UK retail and hospitality businesses.

February by group: Qilin (2), Clop (2), Worldleaks (2), Akira (1), Anubis (1), Beast (1), Everest (1), Interlock (1), Nightspire (1).

March 2026 — 15 Victims in 23 Days (Quarter Incomplete)

March opened with Import Services Ltd (Dragonforce, 3–4 March), a Southampton-based logistics company specialising in port services and freight forwarding, whose name appeared twice on the leak site under both its trading names. Lincoln Green Brewing, a Nottinghamshire craft brewery, was claimed by Dragonforce on the 4th. Community Mosaic CIC, a small community interest company, appeared on the same date (Tengu).

The 6th brought Albany Pumps (Qilin) and the first claim against Salford City College (Dragonforce). Albany Pumps, trading as The Albany Engineering Company, is an employee-owned specialist manufacturer of positive displacement pumps in Lydney, Gloucestershire, with a history tracing back to 1901. It supplies the oil and gas, fire protection, defence, food and marine sectors, and holds design records and customer specifications going back decades. Salford City College, one of Greater Manchester's largest further education providers with around 8,000 students, was then claimed a second time by Qilin on the 10th of March — a double claim by two separate ransomware groups on the same institution within four days, discussed in detail below.

Geotec Surveys (Qilin, 7 March) is a UK geotechnical survey consultancy whose data contains borehole logs, ground investigation reports, and site-specific geology records for client construction and infrastructure projects. RWB Consulting Engineers (Qilin, 9 March) followed, alongside Nenplas (Thegentlemen, 9 March) and Woodfines Solicitors (Akira, 9 March).

Nenplas is a plastic extrusion manufacturer based in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, employing approximately 120 people. It is owned by the German Surteco group and generates revenue of approximately £25 million. With over 3,000 tooling designs and manufacturing capability in PVC, ABS, and HDPE profiles, its data holds significant commercial IP for its customers across glazing, construction, furniture, and industrial markets. Woodfines Solicitors is a law firm across Cambridge, Bedford, and Milton Keynes, holding the full range of conveyancing, employment, corporate, and private client data that characterises an SRA-regulated regional practice.

A J Taylor Electrical appeared on the 10th (Anubis). The Anubis claim description specifically references drawings, tenders, and other data relating to the healthcare sector — a reminder that the supply chain into healthcare runs through electrical contractors, fitting out hospitals and clinical facilities, whose project records are now in criminal possession.

England Hockey was published on the 12th by AiLock, a newer ransomware group that emerged in 2025. England Hockey, the governing body for field hockey in England, is investigating a potential data breach after the AiLock ransomware gang listed it as a victim on its data leak site. The threat actor claims to have exfiltrated 129GB of data and has threatened to publish the files unless a ransom is paid. The organization manages a large national ecosystem that includes more than 800 affiliated clubs, roughly 150,000 registered club players, and approximately 15,000 coaches, umpires, and officials. England Hockey publicly acknowledged the incident, confirmed it was working with external specialists, and stated the investigation was ongoing. It is one of only a handful of Q1 2026 UK victims to have made a public statement.

Communicate UK (Beast, est. 3 March) followed on the 14th, a security services company in southeast England. Angus-Young Associates, an architecture, landscape, engineering, and interior design practice, appeared on the 19th (Akira). Liverpool Philharmonic Hall was claimed by Dragonforce on the 20th, and Muffett Gears, a UK motorcycle protective clothing and accessories manufacturer, on the 21st (Qilin).

March by group (to 23rd): Qilin (5), Dragonforce (4), Akira (2), Beast (1), Anubis (1), Thegentlemen (1), Ailock (1), Tengu (1).

Q1 2026: The Structural Analysis

Architecture, Engineering, and Construction: The Dominant Sector

No sector is more consistently represented in Q1 2026 than the built environment professions. Across the three months, the following UK victims operate in architecture, engineering, surveying, or construction:

Purcell Architects, Gianni Botsford Architects, Urban Edge Architecture, Angus-Young Associates (architecture); Lesk Engineers Limited, RWB Consulting Engineers, A J Taylor Electrical, Geotec Surveys (engineering and surveys); PKT QS (quantity surveying); Central Roofing South Wales (construction); Sandberg (materials testing for construction).

That is eleven organisations from a single sector family in one quarter. The reasons are structural. Architecture and engineering firms hold project data for every building and infrastructure scheme they have touched: client briefs, drawings, ground investigations, structural calculations, material specifications, contractor records, and financial models. They typically operate as SMEs or partnerships without enterprise-scale security investment. Many rely on cloud file-sharing platforms configured during a period when security was not the primary concern. Their project data is commercially valuable to competitors, litigation parties, and anyone seeking to understand how critical infrastructure was built. And their internet-facing attack surface, shaped by the remote working patterns cemented during the pandemic and never fully hardened, is consistently reachable by the automated scanning tools that Qilin and Akira affiliates deploy.

The Clop Triple-Strike: 25 January

The simultaneous publication of three UK victims on 25 January 2026 — Warranty First, BAQUS, and Trust Payments — is the clearest single-day illustration in Q1 of how Clop's mass exploitation model operates. Clop does not target organisations individually. It targets platforms. The CVE-2025-61882 zero-day in Oracle's E-Business Suite, active from approximately October 2025, provided unauthenticated access to Oracle EBS environments across hundreds of organisations globally. Clop silently exfiltrated data, then initiated a rolling publication process as ransom deadlines expired in batches weeks or months after the initial access.

Trust Payments is the highest-revenue UK victim of Q1. Processing transactions across approximately 500 staff and significant global payment infrastructure, its data exposure is not limited to its own corporate records. Payment processor breaches carry the potential for downstream customer data exposure across every merchant and acquirer relationship in the portfolio. BAQUS and Warranty First, less publicly known, represent the same batch exploitation applied to smaller organisations in the same Oracle EBS exposure window.

Education Under Sustained Attack

Three UK educational institutions were claimed in Q1 2026. Richard Alibon Primary School in Barking (Beast, 8 January estimate), Shaw Hill Primary School (Incransom, 27 January), and Salford City College (Dragonforce and Qilin, 6 and 10 March). Primary schools and further education providers are among the UK organisations least equipped to defend against or respond to a ransomware incident. They hold substantial personal data about minors — pupil records, safeguarding files, medical information, parental contact details — in systems that are typically resourced by a small IT team managing everything from classroom projectors to network security. The ICO has consistently found schools among the most common reporters of data breaches in the UK, and the ransomware dataset is consistent with that broader picture.

The Salford City College double claim deserves specific attention. Both Dragonforce (6 March) and Qilin (10 March, with attack estimated 6 March) published claims against the same institution within four days of each other. This is not a coincidence of timing. It reflects the increasingly crowded and chaotic affiliate landscape of the 2026 ransomware ecosystem. With 85 or more active data leak sites operating simultaneously and over 120 groups active in 2025, the probability of two affiliates independently exploiting the same vulnerability window in the same organisation has risen. It may also reflect a shared initial access broker relationship, where credentials or network access were sold to multiple buyers. Whatever the mechanism, the college finds itself on two separate criminal group leak sites in the same week.

Dragonforce's UK Emergence

Dragonforce became a household name in UK cybersecurity after the Marks and Spencer, Co-op, and Harrods attacks of spring 2025, which were attributed to the Scattered Spider threat actor group using the DragonForce ransomware-as-a-service platform. Those attacks struck three of the UK's most recognised retail brands and generated months of press coverage.

Dragonforce's Q1 2026 UK victims are almost entirely different in character. NWIMS IT Group (an IT managed services provider, January), Import Services Ltd (a Southampton logistics company, March), Lincoln Green Brewing (a Nottinghamshire craft brewery, March), Salford City College (March), and Liverpool Philharmonic Hall (March) bear no resemblance to the high-profile retail targets of 2025. They are the output of a group operating a mature ransomware-as-a-service affiliate programme, generating continuous victim volume across sectors and organisation sizes wherever its affiliates find reachable targets. The 2025 retail attacks were a specific Scattered Spider campaign; the 2026 UK victim list reflects the broader affiliate base, which operates opportunistically rather than selectively.

Liverpool Philharmonic Hall's appearance in a March ransomware dataset is jarring at first encounter. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the UK's oldest continuing professional orchestra, is not an obvious target in any conventional risk assessment framework. It is exactly the kind of organisation that would never appear in a penetration testing scope as a high-priority target. It appeared on Dragonforce's leak site on the 20th of March because it was reachable, not because it was specifically selected. The data it holds — audience member personal and payment records, employee HR data, donor and sponsor information, venue operational systems, performance rights administration — is not without value.

England Hockey: The Quarter's Most Publicly Visible Breach

The England Hockey breach is Q1 2026's clearest example of a UK ransomware incident generating press coverage and a public organisational response. AiLock claimed 129GB of data from England Hockey's systems on the 12th of March, and England Hockey acknowledged the incident publicly within days. It confirmed it was working with external cybersecurity specialists and law enforcement, and stated it could not comment further while the investigation was ongoing.

The data at risk is significant by the standards of a national sporting body. England Hockey manages records for more than 150,000 registered club players and approximately 15,000 coaches, umpires, and officials across 800-plus affiliated clubs. This encompasses personal contact information, coaching and officiating credentials, competition records, club affiliation data, financial transactions, and governance documentation. AiLock's double-extortion model means that encryption occurred alongside data theft, and the 129GB figure suggests comprehensive rather than selective exfiltration. England Hockey's decision to acknowledge the incident publicly places it in the minority of Q1 UK ransomware victims.

The Professional Services Pattern

Across Q1, professional services firms in law, accountancy, and consultancy appear consistently. Woodfines Solicitors (March), Collett Hulance accountants (January), Gianni Botsford Architects (January), and Adelphi pharmaceutical consultancy (February) each hold data that derives its value entirely from client confidentiality. SRA-regulated solicitors hold conveyancing files, employment matters, litigation records, and estate planning documents. Chartered accountants hold client tax returns, financial records, and HMRC agent credentials. Pharmaceutical consultancies like Adelphi — with over 700 staff working on clinical trial support, health economics, and market access for pharmaceutical manufacturers — hold commercially sensitive data about drugs in development, regulatory submissions, and client strategy.

The ICO takes a serious view of ransomware incidents at professional services firms, particularly those handling special category data. SRA-regulated firms that experience data breaches are required to report to the ICO within 72 hours of becoming aware of a breach that is likely to result in a risk to individuals. Several of the Q1 professional services victims will be in the middle of that regulatory process now, navigating simultaneous ICO notification, client communication, forensic investigation, and potentially negotiation with the ransomware group itself.

The Healthcare Supply Chain Thread

No NHS trusts appear in Q1's UK ransomware victim list. NHS.UK appeared on Clop's site in November 2025, which was a controversial and disputed claim. The Q1 data contains no equivalent. But healthcare data is present in Q1 through the supply chain. A J Taylor Electrical (Anubis, March) is an electrical contractor whose data specifically includes drawings, tenders, and records related to the healthcare sector — fit-out and maintenance work in clinical environments. Adelphi (Worldleaks, February) works directly with pharmaceutical manufacturers on regulatory and commercial intelligence. MRC Prion Unit at UCL (Crypto24, January) is a medical research institution studying one of the most sensitive areas of neuroscience, with data that includes clinical records from research participants and intellectual property relating to prion disease diagnostics.

The NHS does not need to be directly targeted to have patient-adjacent data exposed. The supply chain that serves it — building contractors, consultancies, research partners, technology providers — collectively holds significant volumes of data that can indirectly affect patient privacy and clinical operations.

Group Performance Across Q1

Twenty-two distinct ransomware groups claimed UK victims in Q1 2026, compared with the twelve to fifteen groups typically active against the UK in any single prior month. This fragmentation is consistent with broader market analysis: Searchlight Cyber identified 124 active ransomware groups in 2025 overall, with the share of attacks attributed to the top ten groups declining as smaller operators proliferated.

Qilin remains the single most active group against UK targets in Q1, with approximately ten claimed victims across the three months. This is consistent with its status as the world's most prolific ransomware group through the second half of 2025 and into 2026, operating primarily through compromised VPN credentials and unpatched remote access exposures. Akira (five victims) and Dragonforce (five victims) are the next most active, with Clop (five victims, all likely from the Oracle EBS campaign), Beast (four victims), and Nightspire (three victims) following.

Nine groups each claimed exactly one UK victim in Q1: Safepay, Sinobi, Genesis, Blackshrantac, Crypto24, Thegentlemen, Ailock, Tengu, and Everest. This long tail of single-victim groups is the structural signature of the current ransomware ecosystem: a small number of high-volume operators running parallel campaigns against the global attack surface, alongside dozens of smaller or newer groups that have each acquired one set of UK access credentials or exploited one UK perimeter device.

The Quarter in Numbers

47 confirmed UK victims in 82 days (to 23 March, with 8 days remaining). One published victim every 42 hours on average. 22 distinct ransomware groups. Approximately 11 victims in architecture, engineering, or construction. Three educational institutions. Three simultaneous Clop claims on a single day. One double-claimed institution (Salford City College, by two separate groups in the same week). One publicly acknowledged breach of a national governing body (England Hockey). One medical research institution (MRC Prion Unit, UCL). One employee-owned manufacturer founded in 1901 (Albany Pumps). One concert hall (Liverpool Philharmonic). One craft brewery (Lincoln Green). One dairy operating since 1904 (Yew Tree Dairy).

The diversity of that list is the point. No sector is immune. No heritage or longevity provides protection. No size threshold makes an organisation too small to appear on a leak site. The criterion for appearing on Q1's UK victim list was a single shared characteristic: an internet-facing exposure that an automated scanner found before a monitoring system did.