Security

University of Nottingham is first of many, Shiny tells The Reg

Data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters has exploited a critical Oracle PeopleSoft bug as a zero-day to compromise more than 100 organizations, including the University of Nottingham, across 300 vulnerable instances.

A spokesperson for the cybercrime crew on Thursday told The Register that they exploited CVE-2026-35273 to break into the university’s PeopleSoft system and steal 40 GB of personal data and billing records belonging to hundreds of thousands of current and former students.

ShinyHunters posted the UK university on its data leak site on Tuesday before publishing the stolen files later that same day, presumably because the school refused to pay the extortion demand.

“University of Nottingham on our leak site is one of the first publicly confirmed incidents,” a ShinyHunters spokesperson told us. “We have only just started outreach to affected orgs and are actively looking to reach an agreement with affected orgs.”

They didn’t say when they planned to post the other 100 or so claimed victims.

A Google threat intelligence report published Thursday afternoon corroborated ShinyHunters’ claims to have compromised more than 100 organizations.

Google said it spotted malicious activity, “consistent with the exploitation of CVE-2026-35273,” between May 27 and June 9,  and notified more than 100 global orgs “whose IP addresses correlated with potentially vulnerable endpoints."

Most of these, we’re told, are based in the US and 68 percent are in the higher-education sector.

PeopleSoft is a widely used enterprise software suite that large corporations and institutions use to manage their human resources, payroll and billing applications, supply chains, and student records. 

CVE-2026-35273 is a 9.8 CVSS-rated vulnerability that allows remote, unauthenticated attackers with network access via HTTP to compromise PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools and fully take over the platform. 

On Wednesday, a day after ShinyHunters leaked the school’s data, the University of Nottingham confirmed the breach and Oracle issued an out-of-band security alert. It’s unclear, however, if the software provider has issued a patch to fix the security flaw. The Register reached out to Oracle, and did not receive any response to our questions. 

Google-owned Mandiant Chief Technology Officer Charles Carmakal, in a brief LinkedIn post on Thursday, warned that PeopleSoft was one of two zero-day vulnerabilities “actively being exploited in the wild.”

“Oracle released mitigations,” Carmakal wrote. “Patches should come soon.”

The other zero-day, for the record, is this Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager vulnerability.®