Australia is investigating an online security lapse after personal records of almost 50,000 workers at several government agencies and companies were left unsecured by a third-party contractor in one of the country’s worst data breaches, according to a report by iTnews yesterday.
Backup databases of employee records, including names, passwords, salaries and some credit card numbers were accessible after the misconfiguration of an Amazon.com Inc cloud storage product, it said.
“Companies should assume they will be breached and take steps to limit the impact of these incidents,” said Bryce Boland, chief technology officer for the Asia-Pacific region at FireEye Inc.
“The reality is many firms are unknowingly compromised,” Roland said.
As the scale and frequency of major hacking attacks increases, companies and governments have come under intense pressure to shore up their cybersecurity.
Only about 2 percent of corporate data is encrypted today, International Business Machines Corp said in July.
North Korean hackers are particularly active amid rising tensions over the country’s nuclear ambitions. They have been linked to last year’s heist from Bangladesh Bank, the country’s central bank, as well as cryptocurrency exchange attacks and the WannaCry ransomware that infected about 300,000 computers in 150 countries.
Australia has experienced several high profile hacks or data breaches in the past few years.
The Australian government said it was aware of the breach involving a third-party contractor and that the exposed data was historical and partially anonymized.
“The Australian Cyber Security Centre was alerted to the breach in the first week of October and immediately contacted the external contractor to secure the information and remove the vulnerability,” the Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet said in a statement yesterday.
Meanwhile, Malaysia is investigating the theft of mobile-phone records for 46.2 million customers, as the government is working with carriers and police to identify possible sources of the leak, state news agency Bernama reported on Wednesday, citing Malaysian Minister of Communications and Multimedia Salleh Said Keruak.
The largest mobile phone companies in Malaysia include Maxis Bhd, Celcom Axiata Bhd and Digi.com Bhd.
The companies, as well as the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, did not immediately reply to requests for comments or could not immediately be reached by Bloomberg News.
Maxis, Celcom and Digi told the Star newspaper that they are supporting the investigation.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by