South Australia's 80,000 government employees leaked information

On 10 December, the South Australian government disclosed that the sensitive personal information of tens of thousands of employees in the state government had been compromised as a result of external payroll software provider Frontier Software's systems being attacked by the Conti Ransomware last month.

On November 13, Frontier Software was attacked by a blackmail attack, and it is reported that the attackers of this incident are conti ransomware gangs. On Nov. 16, Conti listed Frontier Software on its data breach website, but that list has now been removed, which could mean negotiations are over. Frontier Software said the threat was not transferred to client systems through its products, and the data breach only affected specific segmented environments.

Conti is a long-standing ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) that has launched an attack on the Irish Ministry of Health. The gang is suspected of being linked to the revival of the Emotet botnet, which could lead to a new wave of ransomware infections. Frontier Software was listed on the Conti data breach website as shown below:

According to the South Australian Government, the data that has been compromised includes the following:

name

Date of birth

Tax ID

Home address

Bank account details

Employment start date

Pay period

remuneration

Withholding of taxes

The payment type

One-time payment type and amount

pension

Declarable fringe benefit tax

The only public organisation in the South Australian government that has not been affected is the Department of Education, which does not use Frontier's products. The South Australian Finance Minister said any employees of the South Australian government could be affected, with the exception of teachers and the Ministry of Education.

The state government is taking all possible steps to review its cybersecurity measures to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future. The researchers advised government employees affected by the incident to be cautious about emails, phone calls, and text messages they received, reset their passwords, and turn on two-factor authentication if possible.

Note: This article is reported by E Security Compilation.