Australian health insurance and health services provider Medibank has taken some systems offline after identifying suspicious activity on its network.

One of the largest private health insurers in Australia, the Medibank Group serves more than 3.9 million individuals through its Medibank and ahm brands.

Initially identified on October 12, the unusual activity was “consistent with the precursors to a ransomware event”, resulting in the company taking some systems offline, to contain the threat.

“Our ahm and international student member services and policy management systems have been taken offline. This will cause disruptions for some of our customers,” Medibank announced on Tuesday, adding that phone support is still available for the affected customers.

The company says its systems have not been infected with ransomware, and the systems for other Medibank customers have not been impacted and remain functional.

“Ransomware is a common and dangerous type of malicious software that works by locking up or encrypting files, so they are no longer accessible. Our systems were not encrypted by ransomware during this incident,” Medibank CEO David Koczkar said on Monday.

Immediately after identifying the cyberattack, the company also started notifying the potentially impacted customers, including former customers, but says that no user data has been compromised during the incident.

“Our ongoing investigation continues to show no evidence that any customer data has been removed from our network,” the company says.

Medibank is not the only major Australian company targeted by cybercriminals in recent weeks. Telecommunications company Optus has suffered a data breach impacting nearly 10 million individuals, and retail giant Woolworths said threat actors gained access to the information of 2.2 million MyDeal customers.

By Ionut Arghire on Tue, 18 Oct 2022 12:32:27 +0000
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