Latest cybersecurity reporting from selected sources.

Bitter harvest for Australia's Mackay Sugar, attacked in peak cane crushing season

Mackay Sugar, Australia’s second-largest sugar producer, disclosed a cyberattack on June 10, potentially affecting key processing operations. Mackay Sugar is one of Australia’s largest sugar producers and the country’s second-largest sugar manufacturer. The company is based in the Mackay region of tropical North Queensland and has more than 140 years of history in sugar cane […]

Last year in Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific, Main Street businesses like retail and construction suffered more cyberattacks than their critical sector counterparts.

The Australian government is warning about ongoing cyberattacks against unpatched Cisco IOS XE devices in the country to infect routers with the BadCandy webshell. [...]

Australian Clinical Labs Ordered to Pay $3.8 Million Over Pathology Unit Data TheftAn Australian court has fined a medical lab $5.8 million for cybersecurity failures leading up to - and following - a 2022 cyberattack that affected 223,000 patients. The penalty marked the first time Australia has levied a civil monetary fine for violations of its Privacy Act of 1988.

Australian Clinical Labs Ordered to Pay $5.8M in Data Theft at Medlab Pathology UnitAn Australian court has fined a medical lab $5.8 million for cybersecurity failures leading up to - and following - a 2022 cyberattack that affected 223,000 patients. The penalty marked the first time Australia has levied a civil monetary fine for violations of its Privacy Act of 1988.

Frequent flyers’ info takes flight Australian airline Qantas on Wednesday revealed it fell victim to a cyberattack that saw information describing six million customers stolen.…

Australian airline Qantas disclosed that it detected a cyberattack on Monday after threat actors gained access to a third-party platform containing customer data. [...]

An internal error led to public disclosure of reams of sensitive data that could be co-opted for follow-on cyberattacks.

Cybersecurity Officials Launch Major Push for Zero Trust, Secure-By-Design ApproachThe Australian Signals Directorate's Australian Cyber Security Center released guidance on proactive cyber defense strategies to help organizations build a modern, defensible network architecture that's resilient to cyberattacks and designed to help minimize impact on critical systems and assets.

Regulators Say NIST's 2035 Deadline for Insecure Encryption Could Be Too LateAustralia has rolled out an ambitious roadmap to prepare for future quantum-enabled cyberattacks. Regulators are ready to set an end date for several existing encryption algorithms in 2030 - five years earlier than the deadline set by National Institute of Standards and Technology in the U.S.

Cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from Australia, Canada, and the U.S. have warned about a year-long campaign undertaken by Iranian cyber actors to infiltrate critical infrastructure organizations via brute-force attacks

A scathing report by Australia's Information Commissioner details how misconfigurations and missed alerts allowed a hacker to breach Medibank and steal data from over 9 million people. [...]

e-Prescription Provider Brings in Government on Ransomware ResponseAustralian e-prescription firm MediSecure said it is dealing with a large-scale cyberattack that could affect the personal and health information of millions of patients. The company says it is working with the Australian government on a "whole-of-government response" to the ransomware attack.

Akira ransomware crooks brag of swiping thousands of ID documents during break-in Over the next few weeks, Nissan Oceania will make contact with around 100,000 people in Australia and New Zealand whose data was pilfered in a December 2023 attack on its systems – perhaps by the Akira ransomware gang.…

Aleksandr Ermakov, alongside other members of the REvil ransomware gang, are responsible for one of the biggest cyberattacks in Australia's history.

Today, the Akira ransomware gang claimed that it breached the network of Nissan Australia, the Australian division of Japanese car maker Nissan. [...]

Japanese car maker Nissan is investigating a cyberattack that targeted its systems in Australia and New Zealand, which may have let hackers access personal information. [...]

International logistics giant DP World has confirmed that data was stolen during a cyber attack that disrupted its operations in Australia earlier this month. However, no ransomware payloads or encryption was used in the attack. [...]

Details of a major cyberattack against Australia's shipping industry remain few and far between, but the economic impact is clear.