Australian navy ship building company has been compromised by Iranian hacker

Austal, an Australian based defence ship builder company recently announced they have found information security breach inside their data management system.

It is yet to be cleared the suspect of this incident. But the Australian Cyber Safety Centre accused that the attack was done by an Iranian hacking group.

However it cannot be said if there is any direct connections with Iranian government on this matter.

The Iranian embassy personnel in Australia clearly denied any allegation against the Iranian government.

According to Austal it is still not clear how the breach took place but it is confirmed there was an intruder activity.

In the top list of cyber threat against Australia, China took the top place according to Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Centre, but Iran cannot be ignored, because of their sophisticated capability on serious cyber-attack.

The hackers got the access to the company employee details like phone number and address as well as some blue print of ship designs and sketches.

Later the data put on sale in Dark web black hat forum by a hacker named as “the.jocker” for 1 bit coin.

French security researcher Xylitol has shared the sell attempt first over his twitter post with a detailed findings. He was also able to contact the hacker after several attempts and got four samples of the data.

The French security researcher also added there is all most 75 GB of data dump available containing personal information, sketches and drawings.

A day after the Xylitol’s post company stated that the data, which was breached is not classified as sensitive or important document because those data was given at that time to customers, suppliers and sub-vendors. It was added that, the data breach has not affected the daily operations yet.

The Australian Department of Defense also declared the same thing, which stated that they also aware of the breach and they are yet to find any data compromise or sensitive Information leak.