Mining firm suffers data leak

Cyber criminals have posted data on employees, along with private documents that belong to publicly listed gold-mining firm Goldcort, on a ‘paste website’ (one used for storing plain text). The breach was revealed in a recent Daily Dot report.

The data dump included vast volumes of company and employee data, such as payroll, market securities, wire transfer and bank account information. The data also included emails concerning compensation, employee contact information and directories, email addresses, and mobile telephone numbers. Employee passport images, and login and employee network information were also leaked.

The criminals vowed to release further data, which they said will include business-wide emails containing “some good old fashion [sic] corporate racism, sexism, and greed.”

Goldcort emailed its statement to SCMagazine.com in which it said that it had notified the authorities, which are currently investigating the issue.

The statement further added:

“The company’s internal IT security team has been working with leading independent IT security firms to gather facts, provide information and support to affected employees, and enact a robust action plan, including immediate preventative modifications to its IT processes and increased network security protocols.”

The firm would be wise to review its cyber security practice, including the staff currently on the payroll trained to prevent and combat such breaches. Taking a look at its IT security recruitment strategy would be a good place to start, since you can never have too many trained cyber personnel in these times. If the company fails to improve its security soon, it may just find that it falls foul of the next pending threat.