Australia’s No. 1 health insurer says hacker stole patient details

SYDNEY, Oct 20 (Reuters) – Australia’s greatest well being insurer mentioned on Thursday a prison had apparently stolen clients’ medical data as a part of a large breach of knowledge, fuelling concern a few wave of high-profile cyber assaults.

Medibank Personal Ltd (MPL.AX), which covers one-sixth of Australians, mentioned an unidentified individual had proven the corporate stolen private data of 100 clients, together with medical diagnoses and procedures, as a part of a theft of 200 gigabytes of knowledge, first disclosed by the corporate every week earlier.

The corporate didn’t say what number of of its 4 million clients have been more likely to have been affected however warned the quantity was more likely to rise. The Australian Federal Police mentioned that they had opened an investigation into the breach, with out commenting additional.

The disclosure provides a brand new layer of angst to a wave of cyber assaults on Australia’s greatest companies since No. 2 telco Optus, owned by Singapore Telecommunications Ltd (STEL.SI), revealed a month in the past that knowledge of as much as 10 million clients might have been stolen. learn extra

Till now, most public commentary has targeted on the chance that hackers would use stolen knowledge to entry financial institution accounts. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that it obtained a message from an individual claiming to be the Medibank hacker threatening to publish medical information of high-profile people except the individual have been paid.

“What we now have right here is … healthcare data and that simply by itself being made public may cause immense hurt to Australians and that is why we’re so engaged with this,” Cybersecurity Minister Clare O’Neill instructed the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

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Cybersecurity consultants mentioned it was unclear whether or not the info breach disclosures have been associated, given the numerous nature of the assaults, however the publicity generated by the Optus assault might have drawn consideration in hacker networks.

“While you do have a extremely seen breach like Optus in Australia on the market, hackers take discover of that and go ‘perhaps I will have a go down there and see what I can get away with,'” mentioned Jeremy Kirk, govt editor at Data Safety Media Group, a cybersecurity specialist publication.

Bigger Optus rival Telstra Corp Ltd (TLS.AX) has disclosed a small breach of worker knowledge, whereas No. 1 grocery chain Woolworths Group Ltd (WOW.AX) mentioned an unidentified occasion gained unauthorised entry to the shopper database of a cut price web site utilized by 2.2 million consumers.

The high-profile knowledge breaches present the significance of multi-factor authentication – the place an individual makes use of a code despatched to a separate gadget to log in – at each stage of an organization’s community, mentioned Sanjay Jha, chief scientist for the College of New South Wales Institute for Cybersecurity.

“Possibly for finish customers they’ve executed it, however for inside servers they need to have much more stringent management,” Jha instructed Reuters by telephone.

“You want steady authentication so that individuals do not log in and depart it ceaselessly, after which attackers can compromise your system,” he added.

Dan Woods, a former FBI cyberterrorism investigator who’s now head of intelligence at cybersecurity agency F5, mentioned Australia had “undoubtedly skilled its worst few weeks from a cybercrime perspective, however on the optimistic aspect it has been a wake-up name the nation might have wanted”.

Reporting by Byron Kaye in Sydney; With extra reporting by Tejaswi Marthi and Sameer Manekar in Bengaluru; Modifying by Gerry Doyle

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