At a glance.
- Australia's information commissioner brings suit against Facebook.
- Alleged breach of Southeast Asian banks; hundreds of thousands of credit cards said to have been compromised.
- Koodo Mobile discloses breach of customer data.
Cambridge Analytica issues continue to dog Facebook.
The Australian Information Commissioner and Privacy Commissioner has brought a suit against Facebook, the Guardian reports, alleging serious violations of the nation's privacy laws. The action is concerned with the way in which now-defunct Cambridge Analytica passed data collected by Facebook to the app This is Your Digital Life. The data were subsequently used for political profiling. Facebook has acknowledged that 311,127 Australian users were affected. The suit has asked that the social network “pay civil pecuniary penalties as applicable for contraventions that occurred during the relevant period.”
Large banks in Southeast Asia possibly breached; hundreds of thousands of credit cards at risk.
According to the South China Morning Post, major banks in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand have suffered a string of recent data breaches that have compromised credit card details. The company whose research concluded that there had been a major compromise, Kerala-based Technisanct, first announced its findings in mid-February, and says it's notified the six affected nation's CERTs. The CERTs and the affected banks have yet to confirm that the breaches occurred. Technisanct puts the number of affected cards in the hundreds of thousands, but, again, others in the region have called the breach claims "unsubstantiated," as a note in the Daily Sun calls them.
Koodo Mobile reports some customer data for sale on the Dark Web.
Koodo Mobile, owned by Telus and doing business largely in Canada, has sustained a data breach. BleepingComputer reports that the company discovered that its systems had been compromised and customer data from August and September 2017 were taken. In a disclosure to customers, Koodo wrote, "On February 13, 2020, an unauthorized third party using compromised credentials accessed our systems and copied August/September 2017 data that included your mobility account number and telephone number. It is possible that the information exposed has changed since 2017, in which case your current information is not compromised." Some of the data appears to have been put up for sale by the hackers, and Koodo says it's implemented a "Port Protection" feature to limit the damage.