Aussie Emergency Warning Network hacked by rank amateurs The operator of an Australian emergency warning service has denied that user information was breached after someone accessed its system to post “you've been hacked” messages. Over the weekend, people who were registered with EWN.com.au received messages that the system had been hacked. Those messages told users the hack …
they store some or all of email, name, address, phone numbers - and a password to manage your "account".
The address is to localise the warnings and also to confirm you are ratepayer for the sms service that I think is paid for by some local authorities.
They also have a mobile phone tracking app to offer warnings localised to current position, or in my case, apparently to where I was in March 2017.
...they never specified where the breach took place and if you take a wider view the message is quite likely factually correct. Somebody somewhere has almost certainly obtained access to personal data from somewhere, and somebody somewhere is almost certainly working to improve security on systems they know damn well are inadequately secured before they’re found out.
I’m not suggesting that it’s necessarily what the culprits had in mind (or that they had anything other than “teh lulz” in mind for that matter) but receiving a spoof message like this through a mechanism operated as an official communication mechanism operated for and on behalf of a government, and which (even if it’s not holding personal data) one would expect to be secure against malicious or mischievous use really ought to make people think about how well secured other systems which do hold personal data are...
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