A cybercriminal held for ransom an innocent person Australian health insurer’s customer data including diagnoses and treatments, in the nation’s second major privacy breach in a month, officials said on Thursday.
Trade in Medibank shares has been stopped on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) since Wednesday, when police were alerted by a “criminal”, who wanted to negotiate the theft of customer personal data.
Medibank has 3.7 Million customers. The criminalHad provided a sample 100 customer policies from a purported 200 gigabytes worth of stolen data.
Information included customer names, addresses and birth dates, as well as national health care identification numbers (NHCID) numbers and phone numbers.
Cybersecurity Minister Clare O’Neil said most concerning was that records of medical diagnoses and procedures had also been stolen.
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Financial crime is a horrible thing. But ultimately, a credit card can be replaced,” O’Neil told reporters.
She added that “the threat being made here to make private, personal information of Australians available to the public” was a dog act.
The thief threatened third parties to sell Medibank data. He targeted records from 1,000 politicians, media personalities and actors, as well as LGBTQ activists. Drug addictsNine Network News reported the story for exposure.
According to Medibank, the thief wrote that he had found people with very interesting diagnoses.
Medibank declined to comment about the threat and refused to release any information beyond the statement it made to the Australian Securities Exchange.
After Optus’ cyberattack, which resulted in the theft of personal data from 9.8 million customers, Medibank was breached.
On October 20, 2022, many people walk past a Medibank branch located in Sydney. A major cybersecurity breach has led to the extortion of Medibank’s health insurance.
(AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)
The Optus breach, which compromised the personal data of more than one-third of Australia’s population, prompted the government to propose urgent reforms to privacy laws that would increase penalties for companies that fail to protect customers’ data and limit the quantity of data that can be retained.
O’Neil said cybercrime was a growing problem around the world and that Australia needed to be better prepared.
“We are going to be under relentless cyberattack essentially from here on in, and what it means is that we need to do a lot better as a country to make sure that we are doing everything we can within organizations to protect customer data and also for citizens to be doing everything that they can,” O’Neil said.
“Combined with Optus this is a huge wake up call for the country. It certainly gives the government the mandate to do some things which frankly should have been done five or more years ago but that I believe are still very vitally important,” she said. She was referring to privacy legislation reforms that the government hopes will pass through Parliament this coming year.
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O’Neil described the Medibank breach as a “ransomware attack“An attack with malware that blocks or encrypts files to prevent their owner from accessing them,” according to the government.
O’Neil’s office later claimed that she had misspoken and meant that the suspect demanded ransom.
Medibank stated that its systems were not encrypted by ransomware, and that its normal customer activities continued.
David Koczkar is the chief executive officer of Medibank. He stated that Medibank was also working with specialized cybersecurity companies. as policeThe breach was investigated by government experts.
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Koczkar stated in a statement that “I unreservedly apologize for this crime which was perpetrated against our customer, our people, and/or the broader community.”
He stated, “I know many people will be disappointed by Medibank, and I admit that disappointment,”
