Towards the end of last year, the Akira ransomware group claimed responsibility for hacking Nissan’s systems in Australia and New Zealand. The hackers boasted about pilfering over 100 GB of documents from the automaker. Nissan has since confirmed that the breach affected 100,000 individuals.
In December 2023, the attackers published confidential business and customer data online, indicating that ransom negotiations with Nissan had failed. It was reported that the stolen data included personal information of employees and “many other interesting things” such as NDAs, projects, and information about clients and partners.
As Nissan has now warned, Akira members have indeed stolen the data of some current and former employees and customers of Nissan, Mitsubishi, Renault, Skyline, Infiniti, LDV and RAM dealerships in Australia and New Zealand.
“Nissan plans to formally approximately 100,000 people about the leak in the coming weeks,” the company said. “The number may decrease as contact information is verified and duplicate names are removed from the list.”
It is also reported that in approximately 10% of cases, ID cards were compromised, including Medicare cards, driver’s licenses, passports and tax numbers. In the remaining 90% of cases, other personal information fell into the hands of hackers, such as documents related to loans, employment data and dates of birth.
“For each person, the types of information affected will be different. Current suggest that up to 10% of people have experienced some form of government ID compromise. The dataset contains approximately 4,500 Medicare cards, 7,500 driver’s licenses, 220 passports and 1,300 tax identification numbers,” Nissan said in a statement.
Nissan promises to notify affected customers individually to let them know exactly what information has been leaked and what forms of support are available to them. For example, Nissan is providing attack victims with free access to IDCARE, free credit monitoring services through Equifax, and compensation for replacing compromised ID cards.