Australia’s Latitude Group opposed to paying ransom to cyber attack criminals

Australian client finance agency Latitude Group Holdings Ltd is not going to pay a ransom to these behind a cyber assault final month, saying it is going to be detrimental to clients and trigger hurt to the broader group by encouraging additional assaults.

“We will not reward criminal behaviour, nor do we believe that paying a ransom will result in the return or destruction of the information that was stolen,” Latitude mentioned in an announcement on Tuesday.

Last month, the corporate mentioned hackers stole almost 8 million Australian and New Zealand drivers licence numbers in one of many nation’s largest confirmed information breaches.

Latitude, which offers client finance companies to retailers Harvey Norman and JB Hi-Fi, had additionally taken its platforms offline.

“Regular business operations are being restored, with Latitude’s primary Customer Contact Centre back online and operating at full capacity,” mentioned the corporate.

Several Australian corporations have reported cyber assaults over the previous few months, which consultants attribute to an understaffed cyber safety business.

Last week, an Australian government-backed service for victims of identification theft blasted a plan to toughen privateness legal guidelines amid an explosion of on-line information theft, saying it might spur compromised corporations to pay ransom and invite extra hacking.IDCare, a non-profit that helps web crime victims, mentioned by making it simpler for regulators to high-quality corporations for poor information safety and failing to criminalise ransom fee, Australia might inadvertently gas a cyber-crimewave.

The message got here in an unpublished submission, reviewed by Reuters, to the legal professional normal who’s working to replace privateness regulation for the web age simply because the nation experiences a spike in large-scale information thefts that the federal government says has touched nearly each household.

“A significant reason why Australian governments and businesses are increasingly targeted by ransomware attacks … is because we pay,” IDCare mentioned within the submission.

IDCare’s views will rely closely in a authorities evaluate of privateness legal guidelines anticipated to make it simpler to high-quality or sue corporations that fail to guard buyer information, because it has grow to be certainly one of Canberra’s go-to referral teams to assist victims of cyber crime.

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