Nissan North America has revealed that extortionists who demanded a ransom after breaking into its exterior VPN and disrupted programs final 12 months additionally stole the social safety numbers of over 53,000 employees.
The safety breach occurred on November 7, 2023. Upon preliminary investigation, Nissan and exterior specialists introduced in by the agency discovered that though cybercriminals had accessed its programs with out authorisation, the one information entry had been principally business-related. This was communicated to staff in a Nissan City Corridor assembly on December 5, 2023.
Sadly, Nissan now finds itself within the embarrassing place of getting to warn staff that delicate private info was accessed by the hackers – together with the names and social safety numbers of over 53,000 present and former staff.
The automotive firm warned employees in an information breach notification letter of the potential of fraud or identification theft because of the breach, however has not seen any proof that this has occurred up to now.
Nissan has confirmed the accessed information doesn’t embrace monetary info associated to the person staff. The corporate has supplied free 24-month credit score monitoring and identification theft safety via Experian for affected staff.
It isn’t the primary time that Nissan has suffered by the hands of hackers.
For example, in December 2023, Nissan Australia and New Zealand suffered an attack by the Akira ransomware gang which uncovered particulars belonging to 100,000 of the corporate’s prospects, sellers, and present and former employees.
Nissan estimated that round 10% of people affected had had some type of authorities identification compromised – together with tax file numbers, driving licenses and passports.
In January final 12 months, Nissan North America found a “severely mismanaged” server had leaked the proprietary source code of its cellular apps and advertising instruments. It later emerged that the server was “protected” by the username/password mixture of admin:admin.
In the identical month, 17,998 Nissan North America prospects had been affected by a breach at a third-party service supplier.
And again in 2016, Nissan shut down its global websites after discovering itself on the sharp finish of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assault linked to an Nameless protest about dolphin culling in Japan.
