Qantas Contacted By Perpetrator Of Massive Customer Data Breach
Qantas says it has been contacted by a cyber criminal less than a week after revealing a significant breach and theft of data on up to 6 million of its frequent flyers customers from its records during a cyber attack.
The airline has issued a statement that it is working to verify the legitimacy of the contact and have informed the Australian Federal Police (AFP), who are working on it.
While the breach has been attributed to the prolific hacking collective known as Scattered Spider, Qantas has not confirmed the nature of the contact, or whether a ransom was sought.
The airline has recently confirmed that a cyber attack occurred in one of its Filipino call centres, and customers’ names, dates of birth, emails, and frequent flyer numbers were stolen. Other personal information such as credit card, passport, and financial details were not stored in those centres, Qantas has said.
The airline detected some suspicious activity on its third-party cyber platform used by a Qantas contact centre and Qantas said recently that it was investigating the proportion of the data that had been stolen, which it said it expected expected would be significant.
Qantas is continuing to work with specialist cyber security experts to forensically analyse the impacted system and that investigation has determined that the system is now secure and no credit card details, personal financial information or passport details were accessed in the breach. ‘We want to reassure all of our customers that there is no impact to Qantas' operations or the safety of our airline’, Qantas has said in a statement.
In an update on Friday 4th July, the AFP confirmed that Qantas had been working with the authorities investigating the this data breach. In a non-committal statement the AFP said "The airline has been highly engaged in assisting authorities and the AFP with investigating this incident."
Recently the FBI has warned on X that the airline sector was a target of a cyber criminal group called Scattered Spider. Hawaiian Airlines and WestJet have both been affected by similar cyber attacks.
Qantas | ABC | Guardian | News.au | TravelGossip | TravelWeekly
Image: Ideogram
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