It seems like so long since a ‘yuge Australian company was hacked, doesn’t it? One would assume we left them in 2022, much like checkered rugs and fake Vivienne Westwood chokers? Well, it turns out cyberattacks are unfortunately still in vogue, and consumer lender Latitude Financial is the latest company to fall victim — and it’s a big one.
Per the Guardian, Latitude Financial — which buy now, pay later schemes to folks shopping at places such as JB Hi-Fi, David Jones, The Good Guys and Harvey Norman — revealed on Thursday that hackers stole the personal data of more than 300,000 customers.
The company told the ASX 103,000 identification documents — 97 per cent of which were driver’s licences — were stolen from one provider, and 225,000 customer records were nicked from a second service provider in the “sophisticated and malicious” cyberattack. It has not disclosed the names of the two service providers.
Latitude Financial said it had noticed some unusual activity on its systems “over the last few days”.
“While Latitude took immediate action, the attacker was able to obtain Latitude employee login credentials before the incident was isolated,” the company said.
“The attacker appears to have used the employee login credentials to steal personal information that was held by two other service providers.”
UNSW cybersecurity expert Richard Buckland
“Latitude apologises to the impacted customers and is taking immediate steps to contact them,” the company said.
“Latitude is continuing to respond to this attack and is doing everything in its power to contain the incident and prevent the theft of further customer data, including isolating and removing access to some customer-facing and internal systems.”
