Australian telecommunications provider Tangerine this week announced that the personal information of 230,000 individuals was stolen in a recent cyberattack.
The incident occurred on February 18 but was not discovered until two days later. The attackers, Tangerine said, accessed a legacy customer database containing the information of roughly 230,000 current and former customer accounts.
The compromised personal information includes names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses, mobile phone numbers, and Tangerine account numbers.
“We can confirm that no credit or debit card numbers have been compromised, as we do not store this information. No driver’s license numbers, ID documentation details, banking details or passwords have been disclosed as a result of this incident,” the company said in an incident notification.
According to Tangerine, the attackers appear to have accessed the database using the login credentials of a contractor.
To contain the incident, the telecommunications services provider revoked network and system access for the compromised account, removed access to the database, and “changed all other team usernames and passwords”.
The incident, the company said, did not impact its services, nor customer accounts, which are protected with multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Tangerine started notifying the impacted individuals on February 21, encouraging them to stay vigilant on scams and other cyber issues and to report any incident.
“No one is more disappointed than me. Anything that negatively impacts our loyal customer base hurts, and we sincerely apologize to them for this incident,” Tangerine CEO Andrew Branson said.
“Thankfully, over recent years we’ve taken multiple preemptive steps which have included reviewing what data we really need to keep and what we can live without. Moving forward, we are fully committed to learning from this incident and implementing necessary improvements to prevent similar occurrences in the future,” Branson added.
Founded in 2014 and headquartered in South Melbourne, Tangerine offers NBN and mobile services across Australia.
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