230K individuals impacted by a data breach suffered by Telco provider Tangerine

Australian telecommunications provider Tangerine disclosed a data breach that impacted roughly 230,000 individuals.

Tangerine suffered a data breach that exposed the personal information of roughly 230,000 individuals.

The security breach occurred on Sunday 18 February 2024, but Tangerine management became aware of the incident on Tuesday 20 February 2024.

The telco notified the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. 

The telecommunications provider pointed out that no financial information (credit or debit card numbers, banking details) has been compromised. The company also confirmed that the attack did not affect the availability or operation of their nbn® or mobile services.

“We can confirm that no credit or debit card numbers have been compromised, as we do not store this information. No driver’s licence numbers, ID documentation details, banking details or passwords have been disclosed as a result of this incident.” reads the statement published by the company.

The exposed information includes full name, date of birth, mobile number, email address, postal address and Tangerine account number.

Upon becoming aware of the security breach, the company launched an investigation, which is still ongoing, into the incident.

The company hired cyber specialists to investigate the incident, the experts discovered that attackers gained access to an unsecured legacy database.

“We have taken precautionary steps to fully revoke network and systems access for the individual user’s credentials and we have also changed all other team usernames and passwords. Access to the affected legacy database has also been closed.”continues the statement.

The company already notified impacted individuals by email on Wednesday 21 February 2024.

The incident did not impact customer accounts, which are protected with multi-factor authentication (MFA).

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Tangerine)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.