Australian airline Qantas reveals data theft impacting six million customers

Australian airline Qantas on Wednesday revealed it fell victim to a cyberattack that saw information describing six million customers stolen.

“On Monday [June 30], we detected unusual activity on a third party platform used by a Qantas airline contact centre,” states a company announcement. “We then took immediate steps and contained the system. We can confirm all Qantas systems remain secure.”

The airline said the platform stored names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and frequent flyer numbers for six million customers. Qantas did not use the system to store credit card details, personal financial information, or passport details.

Qantas suggests that attackers could not access all the six million exposed records, and analysis The Register offers as in a statement the airline wrote “We are continuing to investigate the proportion of the data that has been stolen, though we expect it will be significant.” However an FAQ about the ...