{"id":11990,"date":"2022-11-10T14:23:33","date_gmt":"2022-11-10T14:23:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/?p=11990"},"modified":"2022-11-10T14:23:33","modified_gmt":"2022-11-10T14:23:33","slug":"hackers-demand-10m-for-stolen-australian-health-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/world\/hackers-demand-10m-for-stolen-australian-health-records\/","title":{"rendered":"Hackers demand $10m for stolen Australian health records"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hackers demand $10m for stolen Australian health records. Medibank<\/a>, Australia’s largest private health insurer, has repeatedly refused to pay the ransom<\/p>\n

Hackers on Thursday demanded US$10 million to stop leaking highly sensitive records stolen from a major Australian healthcare company, as they uploaded yet more intimate details about customers.<\/p>\n

Medibank, Australia’s largest private health insurer, confirmed this week that hackers had accessed the information of 9.7 million current and former clients, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.<\/p>\n

The hackers on Thursday uploaded the second batch of files to a dark web forum, with more sensitive details about hundreds of Medibank customers.<\/p>\n

Read more:\u00a0China accuses Washington of cyber-spying on university<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The first leaks appear to have been selected to cause maximum harm: targeting those who received treatment related to drug abuse, sexually transmitted infections or pregnancy terminations.<\/p>\n

“Added one more file abortions.csv,” the anonymous hackers wrote on the forum, before detailing their ransom threat.<\/p>\n

“Society ask us about ransom, it’s 10 million USD. We can make discount… $1 = 1 customer.”<\/p>\n

Medibank has repeatedly refused to pay the ransom.<\/p>\n

‘Profit and greed’<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Medibank hack \u2014 and an earlier data breach impacting nine million customers at telecom company Optus \u2014 has raised questions about Australia\u00b4s ability to repel cyber criminals.<\/p>\n

Dennis Desmond, a former FBI agent and US Defense Intelligence Agency officer, said Australia was no worse “than any other high-value target or Western country”.<\/p>\n

“It\u00b4s very unfortunate, but I don’t think Australia is any more vulnerable than any other Western developed nation,” he told media.<\/p>\n

Desmond said profit-driven hackers were unlikely to single out a specific country \u2014 and were typically more interested in targeting companies holding valuable data.<\/p>\n

“It\u00b4s the data types that are of the most interest to these hackers,” he said.<\/p>\n

“The healthcare data is a huge target and personally identifiable data is high-value.<\/p>\n

“Generally, profit and greed are the number one drivers.”<\/p>\n

‘Scummy criminals’<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Medibank hack is likely to include data on some of the country\u00b4s most influential and wealthy individuals.<\/p>\n

Medibank chief executive David Koczkar condemned the “disgraceful” extortion tactics.<\/p>\n

“The weaponisation of people\u00b4s private information in an effort to extort payment is malicious and it is an attack on the most vulnerable members of our community.”<\/p>\n

The group behind the attack appears to be pressuring Medibank by hunting for the most potentially damaging personal information within the records.<\/p>\n

The first records posted to the dark web forum were separated into “naughty” and “nice” lists.<\/p>\n

Some on the “naughty” list had numeric codes that appeared to link them to drug addiction, alcohol abuse and HIV infection.<\/p>\n

For example, one record carried an entry that read: “p_diag: F122”.<\/p>\n

F122 corresponds with “cannabis dependence” under the International Classification of Diseases, published by the World Health Organization.<\/p>\n

Names, addresses, passport numbers and birth dates were also included in the data.<\/p>\n

Home Affairs Minister Clare O\u00b4Neil has described the hackers as “scummy criminals”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hackers demand $10m for stolen Australian health records. Medibank, Australia’s largest private health insurer, has repeatedly refused to pay the ransom Hackers on Thursday demanded US$10 million to stop leaking highly sensitive records stolen from a major Australian healthcare company, as they uploaded yet more intimate details about customers. Medibank, Australia’s largest private health insurer, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":11991,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9,3],"tags":[7449,172],"class_list":["post-11990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health","category-latest-news","category-world","tag-medibank","tag-australia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}