The Guardian’s Australian staff were targeted in a sophisticated cyber attack that led to the leak of personal information of 140 current and former staff members. And news is out that personal addresses and their salary info were accessed and stolen by hackers in the incident.
Cybersecurity Insiders has learnt from its sources that the threat actors accessed details such as tax file numbers, bank account details, superannuation data, in the attack that could lead to identity theft attacks in the coming weeks.
As the email servers of the Guardian are corrupted, the staff are using temporarily email accounts to communicate official matters.
Australian Information Commissioner, that keeps an account of data breaches taking place in the region, has begun a separate investigation to know more about the attack details
Coming to the next event, Black and White Cabs, a taxi service of Australia, has made it official that it has shut down its online and phone booking service of cabs as its servers were targeted by a cyber-attack.
Crypto Locker Virus is suspected to be behind the incident and almost all booking systems were hit by a ransom demanding malware.
The company is, however, not interested in bowing down to the demands of hackers and is interested in recovering their data from backups, as they already have a proactive data continuity plan in place.
NOTE 1- The Guardian’s UK branch was the first to get targeted in the attack on December 20th,2022 and it was of ransomware variant.
NOTE 2-At the end of last month i.e., Jan 2023, a pact was signed by the members of Quad countries- Japan, Australia, India and United States; under which machine learning technologies will be used to build a resilient cybersecurity defense line against state funded digital warfare. Therefore, the collaboration is said to use artificial intelligence to better detect network intrusions in an automated way that will improve cyber risk management of critical infra such as power utilities.
