- Kyle Chua
Singtel Confirmed Another Cyber-Attack
Dialog Group, an IT consultancy owned by Singapore Telecommunication Ltd (Singtel), confirmed on Monday it had suffered from a cyber-attack that may have compromised the data of its employees and clients.
Singtel said the attack on Dialog was first detected on 10 September and may have affected around 1,000 current and former employees and not more than 20 clients. Dialog last week reportedly discovered a “very small sample” of its data had been published on the dark web.
“We are doing our utmost to address the situation and, as a precaution, we are actively engaging with potentially impacted stakeholders to share information, support and advice,” Singtel said.
The incident comes just weeks after a similar cyber-attack on another Singtel-owned business, the Australian telecom company Optus. The attack compromised the personal data of up to 10 million Australian customers. Names, dates of birth and contact details, among other sensitive information, were said to have been accessed by hackers.
The Australian arm of Singtel, Singtel Australia, acquired Optus in October 2001, while the technology arm of Singtel, Singtel NCS, acquired Dialog in April of this year.
Singtel said the attacks on Dialog and Optus are independent of each other and there are no links between the two. The Singapore-based telecom company, however, found that the stolen data from a breach it suffered in 2020 was posted in the same forum as the data from the Optus attack.
In February of last year, Singtel reported that a zero-day vulnerability from its system had been exploited by hackers in late 2020 to steal the company’s files. A zero-day vulnerability is a software weakness that has been discovered by a hacker but is yet unknown to the developer.
Singtel immediately suspended the use of the system upon learning about the attack. It determined then that the data of up to 129,000 customers and 23 businesses had been compromised.
Dialog Group, an IT consultancy owned by Singtel, confirmed it had suffered from a cyber-attack that may have compromised the data of its employees and clients.
Singtel said the attack on Dialog was first detected on 10 September and may have affected around 1,000 current and former employees and not more than 20 clients.
The incident comes just weeks after a similar cyber-attack on another Singtel-owned business, the Australian telecom company Optus.
Singtel said the attacks on Dialog and Optus are independent of each other, and there are no links between the two.