By Michael Janda and Kirsten Aiken, ABC
A photo taken on August 20, 2023 shows the wing-tip of a Qantas Airbus A330 descending to land at Sydney´s Kingsford Smith Airport. Photo: WILLIAM WEST/AFP
Qantas is warning a "significant" amount of customer data has likely been stolen from its records during a cyber attack.
The airline has released a statement saying that, on Monday, it detected unusual activity on a third-party platform used by a Qantas airline contact centre.
The airline said six million customers had service records in this platform.
Qantas said it was investigating the proportion of the data that had been stolen, though it expected it would be "significant".
A Qantas spokesman said the majority of affected customers are Australian but some are off-shore, though they did not confirm numbers of New Zealanders.
Qantas flies from Wellington, Queenstown, Christchurch and Auckland to Australian destinations.
They said Jetstar, its budget operation which operates in New Zealand, was not affected.
An initial review confirmed the data included some customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and frequent flyer numbers, the airline said.
"Importantly, credit card details, personal financial information and passport details are not held in this system," the statement read.
"No frequent flyer accounts were compromised nor have passwords, PIN numbers or log in details been accessed."
Qantas said the system had been quarantined and affected customers would be notified.
Cyber firm says attack has hallmarks of international hacking group
Leading cybersecurity firm CyberCX has been working with Qantas over the past 24 hours to address the incident.
A spokesperson for CyberCX has told ABC News the incident has all the hallmarks of an attack from the so-called Scattered Spider hacker group, which is targeting individual business sectors one by one.
Most recently it has been known for attacks on the financial and insurance sectors.
The CyberCX spokesperson said there were warnings from US authorities over the weekend that Scattered Spider intended to target the aviation sector.
Air New Zealand says it has not been subject to any hacking attempt.
- ABC/RNZ
