SO AT THE END OF THE DAY, HUMANS ARE THE WEAKEST LINK

So the personal details of 46 million Malindo Air and Thai Lion Air passengers were leaked by two former employees of its e-commerce contractor, budget airline Malindo Air claims.

So people who have traveled Malindo Air should be wary of telephone calls they may receive from strangers claiming to from be the police, the bank, insurance company, income tax department and so forth which could very well soon follow, even though Malindo Air said that the payment details of its passengers were not compromised.

Many of such calls have turned out to have been scams, with many good people being made to panic and deposit large sums of their hard earned money into a bank account provided by the scammer, such as in this recent case reported by the Sun Daily of 20 August 2019.

Asst manager loses RM130,000 in Macau Scam

20 Aug 2019 / 09:39 H.

ALOR STAR: A 40-year-old woman lost RM129,290 after being duped by a Macau Scam syndicate on Aug 7.

Kedah Commercial Crime Investigation Department head, Supt Annuar Amri Abd Muluf said the victim, an assistant manager of a steel mill in Kulim, had received a phone call from the suspect who identified himself as ‘Sergeant Chew’.

“The victim was informed by the suspect that she had been involved in money laundering and would be arrested.

“However, the suspect told the victim that the matter could be resolved and asked the victim to list her bank accounts and asked the victim to transfer all her money to another account provided by the suspect,“ he said in a statement here today.

According to Annuar Amri, the suspect also threatened the victim not to report the matter or she would be arrested and the case could not be resolved.

He said the panicked victim followed the instructions given by the suspect in which she made five transactions worth RM50,670, RM64,800, RM3,520, RM3,700 and RM6,600 into two accounts provided by the suspect between Aug 7 and 10.

“All of the money was the victim’s savings for having worked in several factories. After the money was transferred, the suspect promised to return the money within three days of the ‘investigation’. However, after the three days, the suspect could not be reached,” he said.

Sensing that she had been duped, the victim lodged a police report at the Kulim District Police Headquarters yesterday and the case was being investigated under Section 420 of the Penal Code for fraud.

Annuar Amri advised the public not to be deceived by calls from individuals who claimed to be the police or any law enforcement agency as the authorities do not conduct investigations by telephone and would not ask members of the public to transfer money to any account.


Annuar Amri said from Jan to July this year, 113 investigative papers involving the same modus operandi were opened in the state involving losses of RM2.9 million. — Bernama

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A neighbour of mine was similarly conned into parting with close to RM500,000 of her savings sometime in late 2017 and whilst she lodged a police report and managed to have the three accounts into which she deposited her money frozen, however until today, her lawyer she has not been able to obtain a court order for the bank to release her money back to her.

Also, when a company outsources the management of customer data to a third party, it distances itself from control over people who handle its data, even though the data still could have been compromised by unscrupulous staff of the company, if it had chosen to host and manage the data in-house. 

Welcome to the information and services economy, folks, where your personal details are at risk from insider human opportunists entrusted with your data, despite whatever gee whiz computer security was in place.

The Reuters article carried by Free Malaysia Today article of 23 September 2019 follows below:-

Ex-staffers at contractor firm caused data breach, says Malindo Air

Reuters - September 23, 2019 9:08 PM

KUALA LUMPUR: Malindo Air, the Malaysian subsidiary of Indonesia’s Lion Group, said today that two former employees of its e-commerce contractor were responsible for its passenger data breach.

Malindo Air confirmed the breach last week after Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky alerted users in Malaysia and Thailand.

Kaspersky told Reuters in an email that it had sent out an alert on Sept 13, two days after the data breach was made public.

Kaspersky said in its alert that the personal details of almost 46 million passengers of Malindo and Thai Lion Air, another Lion Group subsidiary, were posted online. Kaspersky said parts of the leaked databases were offered for sale.

Malindo Air said in a statement that two former employees of e-commerce services provider GoQuo (M) Sdn Bhd in their development centre in India “improperly accessed and stole the personal data of our customers”.

Reuters could not immediately reach GoQuo for comment. Malindo did not name the two former GoQuo employees.

The airline said the data breach had been contained and the matter reported to the police in Malaysia and India.

Malindo Air also said the breach was not related to the security of cloud service provider Amazon Web Services’ data architecture, and none of the payment details of customers was compromised.

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Moreover, since the two former employees leaked the passenger data in India, they are beyond the jurisdiction of the Malaysian police, so Malaysia will have to rely on India's police to arrest with them.

Malaysia ask India to extradite them !!!! Well India may say "OK! We'll hand over these guys to you if you hand over Dr. Zakir Naik to us".

My advice to anyone who receives such scam calls telling you that you are under investigation, owe a large areas in payment, etc., is for you to tell the caller that you will check with the police, the court, the Inland Revenue Department, your bank, your credit card company, your telephone service provider or whatever they claim to be from and hang up.

As for me, now I just hang up the moment I receive such calls from a strange number and don't bother to listen any more.

As productive industries, including manufacturing leave our shores for our lower wage and lower cost neighbours, more information and services industries such as scamming will be behind for the unscrupulous to engage in and cheat good people who worked hard in productive industries all their working lives much poorer.

WELCOME TO THE INFORMATION AND SERVICES ECONOMY!

The marketers, futurists, boosters, CON-sultants and journo-prostitutes of the information and services industry may hate me for this but screw them.

Yours truly

IT.Scheiss
http://itsheiss.blogspot.com/