Medibank Cyberattack Puts Members At Risk Days Before Premium Increase
Hackers who say they attacked one of Australia’s largest private health insurers online have threatened to sell sensitive customer information.
One of Australia’s largest private health insurers was hacked, and the hackers who did it sent a ransom note to the company, saying they would leak sensitive customer information if they didn’t get paid.
The Sydney Morning Herald said that hackers have threatened to sell 200 gigabytes of stolen data from Medibank’s 3.9 million customers. It was not possible to confirm that the message was real.
The hackers wrote: “We’re willing to talk, but if you don’t, we’ll start putting our plans into action, like selling your database to third parties.” 2. But before that, we’ll remove the top 1,000 media people from your list (criteria is: most followers, politicians, actors, bloggers, LGBT activists, drug addictive people, etc) We’ve also met people whose diagnoses are very interesting. And we’ll send them an email with their info.”
In a statement released Wednesday afternoon, Medibank said it had been in touch with a group that “wants to negotiate with the company about their alleged removal of customer data.”
It said that the company was now “working urgently” to find out if the threat was real or not.
The statement said, “Based on our ongoing forensic investigation, we are taking this matter seriously at this time.”
The private health insurer said on October 12 that its services had been affected by a “cyber incident.” But at the time, the company said there was no proof that customer information had been broken into.
Medibank said in a statement, “At this point, there is no evidence that any sensitive data, including customer data, has been accessed.”
“As part of our response to this incident, Medibank will cut off access to some customer-facing systems and isolate them. This will make it less likely that systems will be damaged or data will be lost.”
It went on to say, “As a result, our systems for managing ahm and international student policies have been taken offline. We think that these systems will be down for most of the day.”
Medibank is one of four leading Australian health funds who are increasing premiums on 1 November. Billy Explores urges all Aussies to do a private health insurance comparison, and compare health insurance in Australia through Billy Explores to save time and effort and explore potential savings before 1 November arrives.
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