Australian digital payments and lending company Latitude Financial announced on Thursday that it had fallen victim to a hacking incident, resulting in threat actors obtaining the personal information of its customers.
Latitude provides consumer finance services to The Good Guys, Apple, JB Hi-Fi, and Harvey Norman. The company also offers personal loans and car loans.
According to a report by the Sydney Morning Herald, the company believes that hackers stole identification documents of 328,000 of its customers, which includes the driver"s license details of about 100,000 clients.
Earlier this week, the company recorded unusual activity on its networks. "While Latitude took immediate action, the attacker was able to obtain Latitude employee login credentials before the incident was isolated," Latitude said. "The attacker appears to have used the employee login credentials to steal personal information that was held by two other service providers."
To mitigate the effects of the attack, Latitude has revoked access to some customer-facing and internal systems. The company has also been placed into a trading halt until a further update is made about the hacking incident.
"Latitude apologises to the impacted customers and is taking immediate steps to contact them," the company said in a statement to the ASX.
This security incident follows major cyberattacks that happened in Australia last year. Back in September 2022, telecommunications company Optus suffered a data breach, resulting in the leak of millions of customer data.
Private health insurance provider Medibank also fell victim to a breach a month later. Cybercriminals accessed the account details of 9.7 million current and former customers as well as claims data for 160,000 Medibank customers, 300,000 customers of its budget arm ahm, and 20,000 international customers.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald