iTWire - Latitude Financial says personal data of 330000 stolen in ...

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

It warned that this number could increase as its review of the incident widened to include "non-customer originating platforms and historical customer information".

In an update about the investigation into the breach on Monday, the company said about 96% of the personal information that was filched was copies of drivers' licences or driver licence numbers.

Also stolen were Medicare card and passport details, though this was 1% and 4% respectively of the total data theft, Latitude said.

The breach is now being investigated by the Australian Federal Police.

Major Australian retailers Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi, David Jones and The Good Guys offer buy-now-pay-later services in association with Latitude.

"Because the attack remains active, we have taken our platforms offline and are unable to service our customers and merchant partners," Monday's statement said. "We cannot restore this capability immediately.

"However, we are working to do so gradually over the coming days and ask our customers for their continued patience. Our restoration of these services is aligned to our forensic review."

Latitude chief executive Ahmed Fahour said: "I sincerely apologise to our customers and partners for the distress and inconvenience this criminal act has caused. I understand fully the wider concern that this cyber-attack has created within the community.

“Our focus is on protecting the ongoing security of our customers, partners and employees’ personal and identity information, while also doing everything we can to support customers and applicants who have had information stolen.

“While we continue to deliver transactional services, some functionality has been affected resulting in disruption. We are working extremely hard to restore full services to our customers and merchant partners and thank them for their patience and support. We understand their frustration. Customers should refer to Latitude’s website for regular updates.”

Hybrid cloud promises to bring together the best of both worlds enabling businesses to combine the scalability and cost-effectiveness of the cloud with the performance and control that you can get from your on-premise infrastructure.

Reducing WAN latency is one of the biggest issues with hybrid cloud performance. Taking advantage of compression and data deduplication can reduce your network latency.

Research firm, Markets and Markets, predicted that the hybrid cloud market size is expected to grow from US$38.27 billion in 2017 to US$97.64 billion by 2023.

Colocation facilities provide many of the benefits of having your servers in the cloud while still maintaining physical control of your systems.

Cloud adjacency provided by colocation facilities can enable you to leverage their low latency high bandwidth connections to the cloud as well as providing a solid connection back to your on-premises corporate network.

Download this white paper to find out what you need to know about enabling the hybrid cloud in your organisation.

DOWNLOAD NOW!

It's all about Webinars.

Marketing budgets are now focused on Webinars combined with Lead Generation.

If you wish to promote a Webinar we recommend at least a 3 to 4 week campaign prior to your event.

The iTWire campaign will include extensive adverts on our News Site itwire.com and prominent Newsletter promotion https://itwire.com/itwire-update.html and Promotional News & Editorial. Plus a video interview of the key speaker on iTWire TV https://www.youtube.com/c/iTWireTV/videos which will be used in Promotional Posts on the iTWire Home Page.

Now we are coming out of Lockdown iTWire will be focussed to assisting with your webinars and campaigns and assistance via part payments and extended terms, a Webinar Business Booster Pack and other supportive programs. We can also create your adverts and written content plus coordinate your video interview.

We look forward to discussing your campaign goals with you. Please click the button below.

MORE INFO HERE!

Sam Varghese has been writing for iTWire since 2006, a year after the site came into existence. For nearly a decade thereafter, he wrote mostly about free and open source software, based on his own use of this genre of software. Since May 2016, he has been writing across many areas of technology. He has been a journalist for nearly 40 years in India (Indian Express and Deccan Herald), the UAE (Khaleej Times) and Australia (Daily Commercial News (now defunct) and The Age). His personal blog is titled Irregular Expression.