15,000 Consumers are Impacted by the TPG Telecom Cyberattack in Australia
About TPG
As a result of the merger of two of Australia’s top telecommunications businesses, TPG and Vodafone Hutchison Australia, in July 2020, TPG was happy to be a member of the TPG Telecom Limited (ASX: TPG) group of companies.
One of Australia’s top fixed broadband providers is TPG. TPG provides goods supported by top-notch fiber and next-generation networks thanks to its broad and very valued on-net infrastructure. To home users, small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), the government, major corporate companies, and wholesale clients, they provide a wide variety of communication services. TPG provides numerous corporate networking options, telecommunication services, SIM-only mobile contracts, and countrywide NBN, ADSL2+, Fibre Optic, and Ethernet internet connections.
TPG sets the industry standard for innovation and value by establishing a culture that values its employees, the customer experience, and the services it offers to renters, homeowners, and companies. They are able to provide dependable, quick, and affordable communication services to consumers because of the people, products, network resources, and innovation power that TPG has.[1]
The international PPC-1 undersea cable that connects Australia and Guam with further access to the USA and Asia is part of TPG’s end-to-end network architecture, which also includes significant inter-capital and metropolitan fiber optic networks. They have the network power to provide great performance across every level of the organization and take end-to-end accountability for the services they offer since they own and run their own carrier-grade voice, data, and internet network infrastructure.
The Cyberattack…
A cyberattack that targeted the Australian operator TPG Telecom placed the data of 15,000 consumers at risk.
The company’s cyber security consultants, Mandiant, informed [1] the business on December 13 that they had discovered indications of unauthorized access to a hosted exchange service. The next day, on December 14, TPG Telecom informed consumers that the impacted service contains email accounts for 15,000 users of the telco’s two distinct firms, iiNet, and Westnet.
According to TPG Telecom, preliminary research indicated that the attacker was looking for cryptocurrencies and banking information.
The corporation issued an unequivocal apology to the impacted iiNet and Westnet Hosted Exchange business clients. “We are recommending consumers to take required measures,” the statement reads. “We continue to examine the situation and any possible effect on customers.”[2]
Mandiant said that it has been asked to assist TPG Telecom in its investigation into the incident. It did a forensic historical analysis as part of this and discovered unauthorized access to the hosted exchange platform.
The company said: “They have put in place steps to prohibit unauthorized access and additional security measures, and we are in the process of informing all impacted clients on the Hosted Exchange service.”[2]
Additionally, it has contacted the appropriate government agencies and aims to get in touch with impacted consumers personally as additional details are available.
According to Julia O’Toole, CEO of MyCena Security Solutions, “this latest breach truly does indicate that thieves are using Australia to display to the world how simple it is to walk into major corporations’ digital premises and grab their consumer information.”[2]
According to O’Toole, “details about the incident are still emerging, but with 82% of today’s breaches being executed through stolen credentials, there is high probability employee usernames and passwords were found and used to access the company, and that through lateral movement and privilege escalation, criminals quickly got the crown jewels.”[2]
The third Australian telecom to have a cyber assault since October 2022 as a result of this. In October 2022, a data breach at Telstra, the biggest telecom in the nation, affected some 30,000 former and current workers. This was followed by an Optus attack in October that exposed the data of 10 million consumers. More recently, in December 2022, Telstra disclosed that a data breach that affected hundreds of thousands of consumers was the result of an internal IT blunder.
Conclusion
The government began developing a new cyber security plan in December 2022 as a result of the spate of harmful cyberattacks that have recently targeted Australia. Federal officials want to improve the nation’s government networks, key infrastructure, and cyber security capabilities.
References
Bug Zero is a bug bounty, crowdsourcing platform for security testing. The platform is the intermediatory entity that enables client organizations to publish their service endpoints so that bug hunters (security researchers / ethical hackers) registered in the platform can start testing the endpoints without any upfront charge. Bug hunters can start testing as soon as a client organization publishes a new program. Bug Zero also offers private bug bounty programs for organizations with high-security requirements.
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