Australian Telcos Dialog Suffers a Data Breach

First it was Optus, Second was Telstra. Now Dialog, a third Australian telecom company has disclosed it was breached.

Dialog, a subsidiary of SingTel, said its servers were compromised on Sept. 10, and although initial investigations showed no signs of exfiltrated data, on Oct. 7, a sample of the company’s employee personal data was available on the Dark Web. Still the incident is under investigation

Australia’s largest telecom carrier, Telstra, on Oct 7th announced its own breach, of personal and sensitive employee information, going back to 2017. 

Telstra’s major competitor, Optus, was also recently targeted in a massive cyberattack, which successfully stole the personal information of nearly 10 million customers across Australia. Optus, also a SingTel subsidiary, first announced the cyberattack on Sept. 21.

Days later, the cybercriminals withdrew their ransom demand of $1 million, explaining there were too many eyes on the data. But they leaked more than 10,000 customer records.

Telecommunications companies will be an attractive target for cybercrime because of the vast amounts of data they gather, process, and store on their customers.

National Security Agency (NSA) also regularly turn the focus of their operations  to telecommunications service providers because of the wealth of sensitive data inside their systems.