Cabot Financial Ireland tells High Court 394,000 files were stolen

Cabot Financial (Ireland), a debt purchase and credit servicing firm, told the Irish High Court in late November 2024 that attackers had removed roughly 394,000 files from its systems two months earlier.

Evidence put before the court stated that event logging recorded the company's backup utility accessing 393,984 files over September 17 and 18, 2024, and that about 356.65GB of data was transferred to an external IP address. The material covered customers whose debt Cabot had acquired and customers of financial institutions for which it provides credit servicing, along with loan book records, contact details, employee data and internal corporate information on pricing, redundancies and business opportunities. A company director told the court the files could also contain health or marital relationship details in cases where customers had written explaining the circumstances behind repayment arrears, and that more than 100,000 current customers were potentially affected alongside historical ones.

Cabot engaged the incident response firm Mandiant and notified the Central Bank of Ireland and the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau.

The company obtained an injunction requiring UK-registered web hosting provider Aeza International Ltd and persons unknown to deliver up the data. Its initial application was heard in private in October under an anonymisation order, which Cabot argued was needed to avoid prompting a ransom demand; that order was later lifted. On November 28 the court directed that the defendants be served by post and email, with the case listed again the following month for the injunction to be extended.