A Mayor candidate of Australia is suing Latitude for not protecting customer details from hackers. As the unsuccessful mayoral candidate was one victim of the data breach, the person is claiming $1 million as damages in the federal court.
Shahriar Sean Saffari is the person who launched a legal appeal against the financial services firm of Australia in the court and is seeking a financial compensation for the distress caused to him after the incident.
To those uninitiated, Latitude experienced a cyber-attack in March, leading to data steal of its 7.9 million customers. The incident took place when the suspected group of hackers took control of the servers of the company via a compromised employee account.
The company failed to protect its customers’ data, resulting in a lawsuit..
Since Saffari lost his Master Credit Card details in the attack, he was worried that the attack could lead to serious consequences like identity theft led to siphoning of funds from personal account/s.
Justice Melissa Perry has been assigned the case to resolve and is busy overseeing the developments.
Meanwhile, Latitude Financial Services has already kept aside a sum of $46 million related to the data breach for such customer remediation costs and will apparently allot the fund to the claimant after the case gets resolved.
Parallelly, a joint investigation is being held by the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner and Office of Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) and the investigation might conclude by September this year.
If serious breaches are found, OAIC has the right to penalize the service provider with a hefty penalty that would be later equally distributed among the affected customers in the form of a discount given at the time of loan pay services.
NOTE- Latitude data breach made hackers access details such as driving license details, names, addresses, contact numbers, DoBs, income information of over 900,000 applicants who applied for loans including credit and debit card details. The hackers accessed no card expiry or CVC, as the company stored such details on an encrypted server.
