Car auction house Manheim suffers significant hacking attack

Thousands of Australians’ personal information could be compromised after a cyber attack on a car giant.

Exclusive: One of Australia’s largest car auction companies has been forced to temporarily halt its operations after a major security breach.

Manheim is the latest target of online hackers after their IT systems were comprised last Saturday impacting more than a dozen of their locations across Australia and New Zealand.

Manheim has car auction locations around Australia in cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Townsville that transact thousands of vehicles every week.

The company is understood to hold sensitive information of thousands of Australians who have transacted vehicles with them.

They hold between 30 to 40 auctions nationally every week.

The information they have on file includes customers’ driver’s licences, date of birth, addresses and personal banking details.

Manheim is one of the world’s largest automobile auction company and has 145 locations globally.

Their Australian website has been shut down with a note informing customers they are working towards restoring their IT systems.

Manheim Auctions is the latest victim of a cyber hackers. Picture: Jonathan Ng

On their website it has a note from chief executive officer Charles Cumming explaining to customers they have been unable to proceed with any auctions or sales events for nearly a week after the malicious software breach occurred.

“The incident we have experienced is due to malware (malicious software) which was designed to restrict access to our IT systems and interrupt our normal business operations,” the note said.

“We currently have no evidence that any of our data has been compromised.

“We continue to work closely with external professional IT security advisers who are helping us facilitate a restoration of services as soon as possible.”

It comes after similar data attacks on other large company including freight delivery giant Toll Group and car company Toyota.

The disaster involving Toll’s system was deemed to be on of the most significant in Australian corporate history.

MORE NEWS:

Six Aussies get coronavirus symptoms from cruise ship

Aussie MS breakthrough gains global traction

Captain’s secrets hint at MH370 mass murder motive

MH370 tax: Would you pay it?

Cyber attacks on large companies and e commerce businesses are becoming all too common.

It suffered a ransomware attack earlier this year forcing the company to take down its delivery and tracking systems and it was left unable to inform customers of the whereabouts of their parcels.

Toyota Australia was last year hit by an attempted cyber attack in 2019.

Cyber security expert Susan McLean said these types of attacks were becoming all too common.

“If you are a large organisation of any persuasion, or even small ones using the internet for your business, you are at risk,” she said.

“It’s very foolish of you not to be employing the best tech experts and systems to prevent this from happening.”

She said often these malware attacks were “not sophisticated” and it was more a case of company’s systems not being hi-tech enough to detect the issues.

@sophieelsworth

Originally published as Car auction house Manheim suffers significant hacking attack