Early Warning System In Australia Breached And Abused

January 7, 2019 TH Author headline,hacker,government,australia

Screenshot of the alert

An Australian early warning service has suffered a significant security breach, with customers receiving emails, text messages and phone calls that their personal data is not safe.

“EWN has been hacked. Your personal data stored with us is not safe. We are trying to fix the security issues,” the message said. EWN has confirmed that the message came from the hacker and not from them.

Early Warning Network (EWN), developed by Aeeris, monitors and notifies people of any emergency and weather threats. Customers include a number of government agencies and local councils – the latter providing free access to the service to residents in order to alert them of upcoming weather threats and flood release notifications.

EWN has since posted a Facebook message saying that are investigating and are working with the police.

At around 930pm this evening, EWN was targeted by a hacker who accessed our alerting system and sent out a message to a part of EWNs database. This was sent out via email, text message and landline. EWN staff at the time were able to quickly identify the attack and shut off our systems limiting the amount of messages sent out. Unfortunately, a small proportion of our database received this alert. We are currently investigating the attack and are working with the police to resolve this matter.