A joint police operation targeting misuse of personal information after high-profile Australian hacks has linked “over 11,000 cybercrime incidents” to the Medibank data breach.
The number is contained in a submission by Victoria Police to a federal cybercrime inquiry and appears to be the first time a measure of fallout from the incident has been disclosed.
It relates to the work of ‘Operation Guardian’, which brings together federal, state and territory police and other organisations to - in the words of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) - “identify, disrupt, charge and prosecute any person seeking to exploit personally identifiable information (PII) obtained from [a] data breach.”
Operation Guardian was initially set up to monitor for misuse of data from the Optus breach in 2022, before being expanded to Medibank (2022), MyDeal (2022), Latitude Financial (2023) and file transfer service GoAnywhere (2023).
It frequently cites a case involving a Sydney man’s attempt to misuse stolen Optus data as a case study of the joint operation’s work.
The new figure specific to the Medibank breach - which affected 9.7 million customers - offers a fresh, if brief, insight into the joint operation’s work, as well as the extent to which exfiltrated data may be exploited.
“Operation Guardian has so far linked over 11,000 cybercri ..
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