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Australian police have detected over 11,000 instances of cyber crime relating to the Medibank breach back in 2022, according to new reports.
In 2022, Australia suffered a major cyber crime wave. First, Optus was hit, affecting up to 10 million current and former customers. Just a month later, Medibank was hit by another threat actor, which led to 9.7 million current and former customers being exposed.
Then, early 2023 came along, and the Latitude breach came with it, resulting in 14 million current and former customers being compromised. These attacks are just to name a few.
Responding to the spike in cyber crime, a union of federal, state and territory police established Operation Guardian, an initiative to monitor and disrupt attempts to leverage the cyber attacks as opportunities for further scam attacks, such as through the use of stolen data or phishing attacks disguised as communications from the breached organisations.
Operation Guardian was initially just for Optus, but as attacks continued, it was expanded to include Medibank, Latitude, MyDeal and GoAnywhere.
Now, as reported in a release by Victoria Police, it seems that Operation Guardian was effective, having detected over 11,000 instances of cyber crime in the Medibank breach alone.
“Operation Guardian has so far linked over 11,000 cyber crime incidents to the Medibank data breach,” said Victoria Police in its release.
According to a recent AFP annual report, Operation Guardian’s numbers are based on matches between relevant PII (personally identifiable information) datasets and reports on ReportCyber, Australia’s national online cyber crime incident or vulnerability register.
“Through online monitoring, Operation Guardian collects and shares intelligence with stakeholders and policing agencies, such as the Australian Signals Directorate and the ACIC,” says the 2022–2023 AFP Annual Report.
It is unclear how many crimes were detected as a result of all the major breaches investigated under Operation Guardian, nor whether that 11,000 number only refers to Victorian numbers or if it is a nationwide statistic.
Victoria Police said that over 942,000 Victorians were affected in the Optus and Medibank breaches alone.
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