The July data breach at U.S. insurance giant Allianz Life allowed hackers to steal the personal information of 1.1 million customers, according to data breach notification site Have I Been Pwned.
Allianz Life disclosed the data breach in late July, confirming that hackers stole the personal information of the “majority” of its 1.4 million customers and its employees from a cloud-stored customer relationship database. Allianz has so far refused to confirm exactly how many people are affected by the breach.
Have I Been Pwned, a data breach notification site that alerts people when their email address has been caught up in data breaches, said in a post on Monday the Allianz Life breach includes customers’ names, gender, date of birth, email and home addresses, and phone numbers from a database hosted by cloud giant Salesforce.
Allianz Life later told the states of Texas and Massachusetts the hackers also stole Social Security numbers in the breach.
Brett Weinberg, a spokesperson for Allianz Life, declined to comment to TechCrunch as the company’s investigation is ongoing.
Allianz Life is one of a series of tech and corporate giants that have been targeted in recent months by a hacking crew known as ShinyHunters, a group known for their social engineering skills aimed at tricking employees into granting them access to the company’s databases.
Google, Cisco, airline giant Qantas, and retailer Pandora — and also HR giant Workday, as reported by TechCrunch on Monday — have also reported recent data thefts related to their Salesforce-hosted data.
The ShinyHunters gang is said to be preparing a data leak site in an attempt to extort victims into paying the hackers to delete the data, a tactic often employed by ransomware gangs. The group reportedly overlaps with other hacking and crime groups, including Scattered Spider and The Com, a known collective of cybercriminals who use hacking, extortion, and sometimes threats of violence to break into networks.
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