SINGAPORE – Hackers have attacked a second subsidiary of Singapore Telecommunications Ltd (Singtel), the company said today, raising questions about whether the Southeast Asian telecom giant was being targeted.
In a filing with the Singapore Exchange, Singtel included a statement from Dialog, an Australia-based IT services consulting company it acquired in April, confirming that “an unauthorised third party may have accessed company data”.
Dialog said “fewer than 20” of its clients and about 1,000 current and former employees may have been affected.
The unauthorised access was detected on September 10, and on October 7 it was discovered that “a very small sample of Dialog’s data, including some employee personal information, was published on the Dark Web”, the company said.
Optus, Australia's second-biggest telecom firm and also a Singtel subsidiary, revealed last month that information on up to 9.8 million of its customers – more than a third of the country’s population – may have been compromised in a massive cyberattack.
The Optus breach, one of the largest hacks in Australia’s history, led to the theft of customers’ names, birth dates, phone numbers, addresses, driver’s licence information, and passport numbers, the company said.
It was unclear whether the Singtel Group, which also has major investments in India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, was being specifically targeted.
The company said in its SGX filing that Dialog’s systems were “completely independent” and that “there is no evidence there is any link between this incident and the recent event experienced by Optus”. – AFP, October 10, 2022
