nottingham.ac.uk 2026 Data Breach
Education / Higher Education / Consumer
University of Nottingham 2026 Data Breach: 454,000 Students and Alumni Exposed via ShinyHunters
Major UK public research university.
Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
87/100
Lower riskHigher risk
High and current: recent, valuable data circulating on the dark web now.
Data Sensitivity i
ElevatedExposed data raises the risk of fraud, targeting, and impersonation. Proactive steps are warranted.
619k rowsRecords
2026Year
The Breach Risk Index (BRI) is a proprietary 0–100 score rating how dangerous a breach is right now, based on how recently the data has been circulating on the dark web and how valuable it is to attackers.
Crucial data exposed
Gov IDPassport Number
AddressHome address
Breach Summary
In June 2026 the University of Nottingham was breached in the ShinyHunters pay-or-leak campaign; tens of gigabytes were published including about 455,000 unique email addresses with names, addresses, phone numbers, ethnicities, disabilities, passport numbers and academic enrolment and fee information, affecting current students and alumni.
Full threat analysis, exploitation vectors, and principal guidance below.
10 additional sections · verified field analysis · defensive doctrine
Querying breach corpus…
Cross-referencing exposed field types…
Resolving threat-actor attribution…
Compiling principal risk advisory…
619k rows records analyzed
About nottingham.ac.uk
The University of Nottingham is a large UK public research university serving current students, staff and a broad alumni base across UK and international campuses.
Why They Hold Your Data
A university holds student and alumni identity and contact data, ethnicity and disability information, passport/immigration data for international students, and academic enrolment and fee-payment records.
Recent Developments
In June 2026 the university confirmed a breach after ShinyHunters published data as part of the pay-or-leak campaign.
Data Points Exposed
6 verified field types
Email Address
Ethnicity or Race (ethnicity)
Full Name
Home address High
Passport Number Critical
Phone Number
Breach Impact
The university faced UK data-protection scrutiny and group litigation, with sensitive special-category data (ethnicity, disability) heightening the severity.
Principal Risk Advisory
What this means for a principal
An education-sector breach: student, staff and identity records support identity theft and targeted phishing. For a high-profile principal this is targeting-grade, not merely identity-theft-grade: the combination lets an adversary locate, impersonate, or pressure the principal with little additional work.
What You Should Do
- Freeze credit at all three bureaus and monitor for new-account and tax-refund fraud.
- Treat the home address as exposed: review mail and package handling and physical-security routines, and brief household staff to verify unusual requests.
- Guard against SIM-swap and vishing: add a carrier port-out PIN and verify any 'support' calls independently.
- Do not use unofficial 'am I affected' lookups; several are themselves harvesting operations.
How ObscureIQ Can Help
- Corpus confirmation: determine whether and where the principal (plus household and staff) appear in this dataset and which specific fields are exposed for them.
- Exposure mapping and footprint neutralization: cross-reference against broker-available data and suppress still-removable elements, prioritizing address and phone, since this record re-seeds broker networks.
- ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).
S
Threat Actor: ShinyHuntersConfidence: High
Motivation: Financial extortion, data sale
A prolific data theft and extortion group that began as a database theft and resale actor and evolved toward SaaS-focused extortion. Recent activity involves vishing, credential harvesting, SSO compromise, and theft of customer data from cloud and SaaS environments.
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