Singtel Australian IT unit hit by data breach

Singtel suffered another potential data breach in Australia, with its local IT services consulting company Dialog Group’s servers compromised in a cybersecurity attack involving access of some client and employee information, samples of which were published on the dark web.

The Singtel-owned company stated a third party may have accessed company data, potentially impacting about 1,000 current and former employees, and less than 20 clients. It notified relevant authorities and hired a cybersecurity specialist to work with its IT team to conduct a forensic investigation and continue monitoring of the dark web.

It also is offering support to those affected to protect them from fraudulent activity.

Singtel’s Australia mobile unit Optus was hit by cyberattack in September, impacting up to 9 million customers.

Dialog was acquired in April by a subsidiary of NCS, a wholly-owned affiliate of Singtel.

The operator stated Dialog’s systems are completely independent from NCS, Optus and Singtel, adding there is no evidence of “any link between this incident and the event experienced by Optus”.

Dialog stated it first detected unauthorised access on its servers in early September, and on 7 October discovered a small sample of the data was available on the dark web.