Non-bank lender Firstmac suffers ransomware attack by EMBARGO

When iTWire contacted Firstmac on Wednesday morning, the woman who answered the phone said nobody was around to speak to us. The company advertises its working hours as being 7am to 7pm and the iTWire call was made at about 7.30am.

The woman then said that someone would be in touch with iTWire later, without specifying a time.

Turns out Firstmac has already admitted to the attack, according to the cyberdaily.au website. Given that, the company's reluctance to respond to iTWire is unexplainable.

{loadposition sam08}cyberdaily said more than 500 gigabytes of data, including “full databases, source codes, sensitive customer data” was stolen by EMBARGO, attributing this information to the ransomware gang.

However, iTWire can find no evidence of this claim on EMBARGO's site on the dark web [See pic on right).

Mortgage Business, a media site run by the owner of cyberdaily.au, said Firstmac had confirmed having experienced a "cyber incident" during which an unauthorised third party accessed its IT systems.

Mortgage Business cited a Firstmac spokesman as saying the lender had “engaged forensic experts to investigate what has happened” and an investigation was ongoing.

“We recently experienced a cyber incident where an unauthorised third party accessed a limited part of our IT system,” Firstmac was quoted as saying.

“As soon as we detected the incident, we took steps to secure our system. We also engaged forensic experts to investigate what has happened. Our investigation is ongoing.

“As our investigation continues, we will continue to communicate with all our stakeholders in a timely and transparent manner throughout this process, in line with our values as a family business that treats our customers as real people.”

iTWire has now been contacted by PR outfit Porter Novelli which asked what our query was about. After detailing the query, the PR company promised to get back with a response. That is still awaited.