Cyber criminals who stole thousands of digital files belonging to environmental regulator Sepa have published them on the internet.

The public body had about 1.2GB of data stolen from its digital systems on Christmas Eve.

Sepa rejected a ransom demand for the attack, which has been claimed by the international Conti ransomware group.

Contracts, strategy documents and databases are among the 4,000 files released.

The data has been put on the dark web - a part of the internet associated with criminality and only accessible through specialised software.