Qantas contacted by ‘potential cybercriminal’ after hack
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The news: In a statement released on Monday evening, Qantas said that a potential cyber criminal has made contact with the airline almost one week after personal data from up to 6 million customer records was stolen from the airline.
The context: Qantas explained that the Australian Federal Police have been engaged to assess the legitimacy of the contact.
“A potential cyber criminal has made contact, and we are currently working to validate this,” the statement reads. “As this is a criminal matter, we have engaged the Australian Federal Police and won’t be commenting any further on the details of the contact.”
Qantas did not confirm the nature of the contact or whether the group asked for a ransom.
The airline added that there is no evidence that any personal data stolen from Qantas has been released, “but with the support of specialist cyber security experts, we continue to actively monitor.”
Last week, Qantas said that an initial review of the hack confirmed the data includes some customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and frequent flyer numbers. The hackers had used AI voice technology to persuade a call centre operative to provide access to Qantas data that had been held by Salesforce as a third-party software provider.
Qantas said credit card details, personal financial information and passport details are not held in this system. No frequent flyer accounts were compromised, and no password PIN numbers or login details were accessed.
Last month, Google warned that hackers were tricking employees into installing a modified version of a Salesforce-related app to gain access to Salesforce data before extorting them. Google’s Threat Intelligence Group said that the hackers (identified as UNC6040) have “proven particularly effective in tricking employees…into actions that grant the attackers access or lead to the sharing of sensitive credentials, ultimately facilitating the theft of organisation’s Salesforce data.” It is not known whether the Qantas hack was carried out through this method or criminal group.
