Personal details of nearly 80,000 employees have leaked to hackers, says a spokesperson from the South Australia government. Information is out that the details of 38,000 employees have been accessed by threat actors is confirmed and there is a high possibility that information related to more than 80k employees could have been accessed by cyber criminals.
Going deep into the details, Frontier Software, a company offering payroll software was digitally compromised in November this year, leading a pathway to hackers to access critical info such as home addresses, DoBs, bank account details, remuneration, superannuation contribution of employees on individual note, their tax filing details and their full names.
Australian financial authority has taken a note of the incident and launched a probe.
All government employees have been asked to take precautionary measures by keeping a tab of their recent bank statements and changing their passwords of their online banking accounts.
From the past two days, a certain section of media has started circulating that the data breach could affect the pay cycle of the employees for this Christmas season.
However, the South Australia government denied this news claim and stated that no such delay in payments is expected, as the account payrolls for this month were already accomplished.
Usually recovery from ransomware attacks is time and money consuming and the state government is expected to shell out huge to put cybersecurity measures in place for avoiding such incidents in the future.
Note- In the year 2019, a similar incident took place on US accounting firm Wolters Kluwer, leading to downtime to all of its clients worldwide, eventually pushing the company into heavy losses.
