Malaysia is investigating the theft of mobile-phone records for 46.2 million customers, while an online security lapse in Australia exposed personal details of almost 50,000 employees.
The Malaysian government is working with carriers and police to investigate the issue and identify possible sources of the leak, the state news agency Bernama reported Wednesday, citing Communications and Multimedia Minister Salleh Said Keruak. A spokesman confirmed his comments. The data may last have been updated in 2014, according to local reports.
In Australia, personal records of almost 50,000 workers at several government agencies and companies were left unsecured by a third-party contractor in one of the country’s worst data breaches, according to a report Thursday by iTnews. Backup databases of employee records including names, passwords, salaries and some credit card numbers were accessible after the misconfiguration of an Amazon.com Inc cloud storage product, it said.
“Companies should assume they will be breached and take steps to limit the impact of these incidents,” said Bryce Boland, chief technology officer for the Asia-Pacific region at FireEye Inc. “The reality is many firms are unknowingly compromised.”
As the scale and frequency of major hacking attacks increases, companies and governments have come under intense pressure to shore up their cybersecurity. Only about 2 per cent of corporate data is encrypted today, International Business Machines Corp said in July.
North Korean hackers are particularly active amid rising tensions over the country’s nuclear ambitions. They have been linked to last year’s heist from Bangladesh’s central bank as well as cryptocurrency exchange attacks and the WannaCry ransomware that infected about 300,000 computers in 150 countries.
Malaysia, with a population of 32 million, has a mobile penetration rate of 134 per cent as of March this year, according to government statistics. Almost 80 per cent of the 42.8 million subscriptions as of the first quarter are pre-paid accounts.