A little over a week ago, Financial services provider Latitude Financial said about 300,000 personal identity documents had been stolen in a “sophisticated and malicious cyber attack”. Now the company, which is used by major retailers Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi, David Jones and The Good Guys, says driver licence details of 7.9 million Australian and New Zealand customers were stolen during the breach.
“In addition, approximately 53,000 passport numbers were stolen. We have also identified less than 100 customers who had a monthly financial statement stolen,” it said in a statement.
“A further approximately 6.1 million records dating back to at least 2005 were also stolen, of which approximately 5.7 million, or 94 per cent, were provided before 2013.
“These records include some but not all of the following personal information: name, address, telephone, date of birth.”
The breach has now eclipsed last October’s Medibank Private breach, in which personal information belonging to 9.7 million current and former customers was accessed.
Cyber-security expert Asjad Athick says timely, precise and complete communication of impact helps protect the security and wellbeing of those affected.
He says: “We must focus on how we substantially minimise the impact of a data breach on the lives of citizens. How we manage, verify and retain customer identity documents when interacting with businesses is a key example of a system that requires modernisation.”
Have you been caught up in this cyber-attack or in any of the others? Do you do anything differently no given the number of cyber-attacks that are happening?
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