Nissan North America has revealed that extortionists who demanded a ransom after breaking into its exterior VPN and disrupted techniques final yr 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 techniques with out authorisation, the one knowledge entry had been largely business-related. This was communicated to employees in a Nissan City Corridor assembly on December 5, 2023.
Sadly, Nissan now finds itself within the embarrassing place of getting to warn employees 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 opportunity of fraud or id theft because of the breach, however has not seen any proof that this has occurred up to now.
Nissan has confirmed the accessed knowledge doesn’t embrace monetary info associated to the person employees. The corporate has provided free 24-month credit score monitoring and id theft safety via Experian for affected staff.
It isn’t the primary time that Nissan has suffered by the hands of hackers.
As an illustration, 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 clients, 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 yr, Nissan North America found a “severely mismanaged” server had leaked the proprietary source code of its cell 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 clients 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.
