Medibank In December 2022, Medibank, the Australian health insurance giant, was the victim of a major data breach, affecting the personal details of 9.7 million customers. The attack was believed to be linked to a well-known ransomware group based in Russia, the REvil ransomware gang.
The latest cyberattack involves digital payments firm Latitude Group Holdings and intellectual property services provider IPH Ltd. The cyberattack on Latitude, a company that issues consumers loans and buy now pay later schemes, revealed that hackers have stolen the personal information of more than 300,000 customers.
Key points: Australia and other nations have blamed China for a cyber attack on US critical infrastructure. Microsoft says a China-sponsored attack used valid credentials to stealthily infiltrate systems. The home affairs minister says Australia won't shy away from holding China accountable.
Woolworths. Woolworths experienced a cyber-attack in 2022 that caused millions of customers to lose their private information.
Media reports have identified Zoom, Meta, Microsoft, Twitch and Panasonic as all allegedly suffering data breaches. These companies all declined to respond to the ABC's questions about whether their breaches triggered reporting requirements to Australian authorities.
Activision Data Breach: Call of Duty makers Activision has suffered a data breach, with sensitive employee data and content schedules exfiltrated from the company's computer systems. Although the breach occurred in early December 2022, the company has only recently revealed this to the public.
The March cyberattack on Latitude Financial was at least 42 times bigger than initially reported, making it one of the largest reported data breaches in Australian history.
"Roughly-one third of adult Australians, or around 6.4 million people, have been the victim of a breach in the last 12 months," Professor Biddle, from the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods, said.
According to the latest Annual Cyber Threat Report 2021-2022, the Australian Cyber Security Centre recorded a staggering 76,000 cybercrime reports, representing a 13% increase from the previous financial year.
In total, there were 497 notifiable data breaches reported between July and December 2022, a 26 percent increase on the first half of the year. The report states that five breaches affected more than 1 million individuals.
“Cyber criminals are targeting the personal data of Australians for financial gain – to sell, to hold to ransom, or to commit financial fraud and scams,” said Reinhart Hansen, director of technology at Imperva's CTO office.
The hacker who claims to be behind the attack has said that they have extracted the data of 162 million users. According to an announcement from CBA on behalf of PTBC, the cyber attack occurred when hackers gained “unauthorised access to a web-based software application used for project management”.
Technology experts say hackers have targeted Australia just as a skills shortage has left companies understaffed and an already overworked cyber security workforce ill-equipped to stop attacks.
A hacker was able to access potentially 40 million credit card numbers by infiltrating the network of a company that processed payment data for MasterCard International Inc. and other companies, MasterCard said Friday.
In Australia, we also saw an increase in the number and sophistication of cyber threats, making crimes like extortion, espionage, and fraud easier to replicate at a greater scale. The ACSC received over 76,000 cybercrime reports, an increase of nearly 13 per cent from the previous financial year.
With definitions out of the way, you can be sure of the kinds of hackers we're talking about. Indeed, China is home to the world's highest number of hackers per capita.
Australia has earned itself the title of most frequently hacked nation in the world this quarter, according to new findings from VPN provider Surfshark. The VPN service company found that in Q4 2022, Australia had the highest data breach rate in the world, with 7,387 user accounts per 100,000 being hacked.
One of the largest hacks in history was the Marriott International data breach in 2018 that exposed 500 million guest records, including passport details, credit cards, arrival-departure dates, PII, etc.
Scamwatch received 239,237 scam reports last year, a 16.5% drop in the number of reports received in 2021. But the financial losses totalled more than $569m, a 76% increase compared to losses reported in the previous year.
Australia's security environment is expected to continue to be complex and challenging, with key threats including terrorism, espionage and foreign interference. Continued review and amendments to existing legislation and policy will be necessary to maintain Australia's national security.
The Optus data breach was one of the biggest security breaches ever in Australian history. As the second-largest telecommunications company in Australia, this security incident brought up questions about Australian data security policies and how companies handle them.
The most recent Netflix data breach happened in October 2021, when a Netflix employee leaked commercially sensitive company data in protest of Dave Chappelle's special, The Closer.