Mysterious 'cybercriminal' makes contact with Qantas a week after the data of SIX MILLION customers was stolen
Last week, the airline detected a hack that potentially compromised the names, dates of birth, email addresses and frequent flyer numbers of six million customers.
Qantas have not disclosed whether the hacker, or any group they might be affiliated with, have demanded a ransom.
A Qantas spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia: 'A potential cybercriminal has made contact and we are currently working to validate this.
'As this is a criminal matter, we have engaged the Australian Federal Police and won't be commenting any further on the detail of the contact.
'There is no evidence that any personal data stolen from Qantas has been released but, with the support of specialist cyber security experts, we continue to actively monitor.'
The airline said earlier in July a third-party system used by an offshore call centre had been attacked two days earlier.
Unusual activity detected on the third-party platform used by the airline's contact centre in Manila , prompted an investigation.
Qantas confirmed the breach last Wednesday.
The airline said no credit card details, personal financial information or passport details were held on the hacked platform.
No frequent flyers accounts were compromised and Qantas stated the bread had been 'contained'.
The airline warned customers to remain 'alert for unusual communications claiming to be from Qantas'.
New security measures have been added for customers' frequent flyer accounts, including requiring extra identification for any charges.
Since the attack was revealed, Qantas has received more than 5000 customer inquiries.
'I want to apologise again for the uncertainty this has caused,' chief executive Vanessa Hudson said.
'We know that data breaches can feel deeply personal and understand the genuine concern this creates for our customers.
'Right now we're focused on providing the answers and transparency they deserve.'
Legal experts suggest the incident could lead to a class action against Qantas after compensation claims were made against Optus and Medibank following major breaches in 2022.
The Optus data breach saw hackers gain access to names, phone numbers and drivers licences of the telecommunications giant's customers.
A ransomware gang also breached Medibank Private, sharing private customer data online in a bid to blackmail the health insurer into paying a ransom.
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Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
The lies that got Erin Patterson sacked from her air traffic control job as ANOTHER tainted food claim emerges... and the insulting three-word nickname colleagues gave the 'weird' triple murderer
Erin Patterson was branded 'crazy' by colleagues before being fired from her job as an air traffic controller for lying about her working hours. Patterson, 50, was found guilty on three counts of murder and one of attempted murder on Monday after serving her in-laws beef Wellingtons poisoned with death cap mushrooms at her Leongatha home on July 29, 2023. In her late 20's, she had worked at Airservices Australia and trained with traffic control course number four in Melbourne between February and November 2001. The murderer, whose maiden name was Scutter before marrying Simon Patterson in 2007, was secretly nicknamed 'Scutter the Nutter' among her training group. 'Something was not quite right, she was a bit strange,' a coursemate who asked not to be named told The Herald Sun. The source described Patterson as 'super secretive' about her life, claimed she was also dubbed 'crazy Erin' by her peers and that 'she would say some weird off-the-cuff things … she wasn't a nice person, she just wasn't someone you connected to'. Another colleague, who had managed Patterson, said she was counselled about her disheveled appearance and that there had been concerns raised by a different workmate that she had placed a blade from a pencil sharpener in a banana. 'Again, no one could prove that, but she had a way about her that was off-putting,' the colleague told The Australian. Patterson worked in the Southern Flight Information Region, based in Melbourne, from February 12, 2001, until November 28, 2002. She was fired after Airservices Australia management began to suspect she was leaving work early while claiming the time. CCTV from the car park confirmed management's suspicions, but Patterson lied until she was showed the incriminating footage. The former colleague described Patterson as 'manipulative', 'aggressive' and branded her a 'pathological liar'. It's understood Patterson 'wrapped [men] around her little finger' and had been pursued by several staff members. Not long after Patterson left the job in 2002, she was slapped with a long-term licence ban after driving drunk and fleeing the scene of a car crash. On Monday, a jury found Patterson guilty to Ian Wilkinson's attempted murder, then his wife Heather's murder, followed by the murders of Gail and Don Patterson. The 50-year-old mother served death cap mushroom-laced beef Wellington parcels to her estranged in-laws. Within hours of the verdict, the Supreme Court released dozens of pieces of evidence that helped prosecutors secure the conviction. This included photos showing remnants of beef Wellington leftovers as they were tested by toxicologists, after police found them inside a bin at Patterson's home. A video of Patterson discharging herself from Leongatha Hospital, minutes after she had arrived, was also released and showed her speaking to hospital staff at the entrance. Images of Patterson at Leongatha Hospital, after she took herself there, revealed a pink phone police say they never recovered. Prosecutors said this was Patterson's primary phone in 2023 and claimed she had used it to find death cap mushrooms online. Photos of yellow mushrooms on scales were released, along with footage of Patterson getting rid of a food dehydrator at Koonwarra tip. The Sunbeam dehydrator, which she bought three months before the lunch, was found to contain death cap mushroom toxins. The jury's guilty verdicts came seven days after they had been sent away to deliberate and 11 weeks into the trial in Morwell, regional Victoria. Patterson faces a sentence of life in prison for the three murders and one attempted murder. The families of the murder victims, who died in hospital days after eating lunch at Patterson's home, were absent for the verdicts, as was sole lunch survivor Ian Wilkinson. Homicide Squad Detective Dean Thomas said the families had asked for privacy. 'It's very important that we remember ... that three people have died and we've had a person that nearly died and was seriously injured as a result and that has led to these charges,' he said outside court. 'I ask that we acknowledge those people and not forget them.'
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Australian mushroom murders: Erin Patterson guilty verdict ends weeks of laborious detail and ghoulish fascination
Several hours after a person eats death cap mushrooms and becomes violently unwell, there is a period of relief. They feel as if they are improving. They are not. This pause soon gives way to 'a relentlessly progressive and quite frightening rapid deterioration into multiple organ failure'. 'The body's different organ systems essentially shut down and the patient is extremely unwell, at a very high risk of dying,' the director of intensive care at Austin Health, Dr Stephen Warrillow, told Erin Patterson's triple murder trial. At times it seemed almost an afterthought, during an extended trial subject to ghoulish fascination, that Don Patterson, Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson died terrible deaths. Ian Wilkinson barely escaped the same fate, but he was watching in court as Warrillow gave his evidence. Not five metres to Ian's left was the woman who allegedly tried to kill him. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email There was no dispute that Patterson poisoned him and the others with death cap mushrooms, that the blame for their deaths fell at her feet. But had she meant to do it? On Monday, a Victorian supreme court jury convicted Patterson of murdering her estranged husband's parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and his aunt, Heather Wilkinson. The 12-person jury also found Patterson guilty of attempting to murder Heather's husband, Ian Wilkinson. The difficulty in proving Patterson's intent – as the defence made sure it repeatedly emphasised – was that the prosecution could not say why she killed three people and tried to kill a fourth. Despite the law being clear that no motive was required, this was no small thing for a jury: how to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that a mother of two, with no criminal history, is guilty of triple murder, when nobody can tell you why she did it? Patterson said the deaths were due to the most trivial thing, a slight reorganisation of her pantry. At some point, she put foraged mushrooms that she did not realise were death caps in the same Tupperware container as mushrooms bought from an Asian grocer. She started foraging around the start of the pandemic, Patterson told the jury, and continued the habit for the next three years every autumn, picking mushrooms that grew on her properties and in public spaces including botanic gardens. Patterson bought a dehydrator in April 2023 because she loved wild mushrooms, but they didn't keep for long. Drying them meant they would last longer. A few days earlier, Patterson said, she bought dried mushrooms from an Asian grocer in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. They were too 'pungent' for the dish she was making, so she removed them from their packet, and put them in a different Tupperware container. This container was stored in her pantry at her home in Leongatha in May and June. At about this time, Patterson said she put wild mushrooms that she foraged and dehydrated in that same container. Patterson said none of this was clear to her until Simon confronted her in Monash hospital three days after the lunch, and asked whether the dehydrator was 'how you poisoned my parents'. 'Did that comment by Simon cause you to reflect on what might have been in the meal?' Patterson's barrister, Colin Mandy SC, asked her on 4 June. 'It caused me to do a lot of thinking about a lot of things, yeah,' Patterson answered. She went on: 'It got me thinking about all the times that I'd used [the dehydrator] … how I had dried foraged mushrooms in it weeks earlier, and I was starting to think, 'what if they'd gone in the container with the Chinese mushrooms? Maybe – maybe that had happened'.' Patterson started to feel scared, responsible, worried her children would be taken away, because 'Simon seemed to be of the mind that maybe this was intentional', the court heard. This conversation with Simon was the fulcrum, where the wheel started to turn, as Mandy put it, where Patterson decided to cover up her foraging, the Covid habit turned deadly. She dumped the dehydrator the next day, lied to police repeatedly in an interview about foraging and the dehydrator three days later still, and remotely reset her phone to conceal evidence of both those parts of her life from homicide squad detectives, the court was told. But there was a significant point of contention about Patterson's version of events: Simon said the conversation at Monash hospital never happened. According to the prosecution, Patterson bought the dehydrator as a murder weapon on 28 April 2023, soon after she travelled to the township of Loch to source death cap mushrooms. She bought it for the sole purpose of disguising death caps so she could fatally poison the lunch guests, not to preserve wild mushrooms so she could cook with them year-round, the court heard. This was no pantry error, the prosecution said, but a murderous plot, weeks in the making. Even the fact Patterson was in Monash hospital was, on the prosecution case, a ruse: she was pretending to be sick so as not to arouse suspicion about why the others were fatally unwell, and she was not. A lot turned, therefore, on what the jury made of Patterson's account about these weeks before the lunch. What in general did they make of her, a self-confessed liar, urging them to believe her now? Is someone more believable once they admit their untruths? Or are they damned as a liar? Mandy told the jury that Patterson was not on trial for lying, but the conclusions they made about her lying could help them reach a verdict. Patterson could have taken the stand regardless of the advice of her lawyers. There was much about her extended period in the witness box that may have caused them anxiety. Her eight days in the stand left their mark on Patterson; she was in tears soon after she started, and in tears as she ended, but it did not seem to harm her case. Whether she came out, as Mandy said, unscathed, or as the prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC said, with yet more lies attached to her name, was a matter for the jury. What certainly emerged was a fuller picture of her, edges and shape, the third dimension to the flat picture of her seen on screens and in the dock. Patterson said she was a binge eater, who had struggled with her body image since she was a child whose mother forced her to weigh herself, she said. The day of the lunch, she binge ate two-thirds of an orange cake brought by Gail, then vomited it up – a plausible explanation, the defence said, for why she was less unwell than her guests later. She also described regularly consulting 'Dr Google' to understand health ailments, and admitted to having overstated health complaints including cancer to elicit sympathy. Patterson spoke of the camping trips and the religious epiphany at Ian's church that occurred in the years after she met Simon, while they were working for the same suburban council. She had owned a bookshop in Western Australia, worked as an air traffic controller, then had no need to work at all because of inheritances worth several million dollars. Her plans for 2023 included studying a bachelor of nursing and midwifery, but she had deferred before the lunch. Nothing appeared to define her more than motherhood, however: her 16-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter were the centre of a universe that included their doting grandparents, Don and Gail. Patterson's five days of cross-examination were punctuated by revelations, but without moments of genuine shock. Rogers said the 'starkest lie' which emerged was that Patterson claimed she was having gastric bypass surgery, when she had no such appointment. There was probing of whether Patterson was 'two-faced' – the loving daughter-in-law who helped in church every second Sunday and stayed part of her estranged husband's family eight years after they separated, and the woman who vented 'fuck 'em' about the same family to her friends online. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion More may have emerged if so many of the questions asked of Patterson did not end with an invitation for her to give a single word response. Rogers asked Patterson more than 200 questions that ended with the words 'agree or disagree' or 'correct or incorrect', and others still ended with just one of those words. Patterson was not asked whether she tried the duxelles after, in her telling, she accidentally added death cap mushrooms to a bland dish. Is this not what any home cook would do, after adding an ingredient to improve a meal? Mandy told the jury they could infer she did just that. Indeed, many details about how Patterson said this accident happened remained inexact, including when and where she picked the mushrooms; why she had not used them in other meals before, given they were there for some weeks and her love of mushrooms; why she combined different types of dried mushrooms in the same container, including button mushrooms from Woolworths, when one of these varieties, had been too 'pungent' for a dish; what exactly did the container look like, and could Patterson identify it, given police took dozens of photos of her kitchen. There were other questions, too, that were not asked about Patterson's conduct after the lunch. Patterson was asked countless times about her bowel movements, the phrase, 'poo your pants' and variances a common occurrence, but not about why she was wearing white pants at a time she said she was suffering diarrhoea. Patterson was the final witness in her trial. Her estranged husband, Simon, was the first. Between them were about 50 others, police and doctors and family and mycologists, some linked to the case in intimate, life-altering ways, others seemingly perturbed about being dragged into it. Patterson watched these witnesses closely from her seat in the dock, mostly with her chin slightly raised, reading glasses on or close by, ready to be used should an exhibit appear on the screen to her left. From her seat, Patterson could see through a large window, covered with translucent blinds, facing south. As the trial dragged on through the end of autumn and into winter, she could watch as leaves withered, turned the colour of the terracotta roofs below, and were blown loose. Occasionally, one flitted against the window, an almost startling reminder that life outside court number four went on. Beyond Morwell is the Hazelwood open cut coalmine, and further still, the foothills of the Strezlecki Ranges. They are a barrier between the Latrobe Valley, where the trial was held, and South Gippsland, the region where Patterson and the guests are from. There is little in common between Leongatha, where Patterson lived, and Morwell, where she opted for the trial to be held, despite them being only 60km apart. As there was barely a link between the towns, there was a sense that the trial was a travelling circus: everybody would soon pack up and leave, without any lingering sense of loss or trauma in Morwell. And a circus, at times, it was: people were chased out of court after trying to take selfies with Patterson, or, at one point, reaching out to touch her hand. Another man was marched out after directing a protest at Justice Christopher Beale. An article that was to be about the 'media circus' breached a suppression order, as did multiple other publications. Other media outlets, and a juror who was dismissed, could yet face further proceedings resulting from the trial. On the days Patterson gave evidence, a handful of people waited outside from about 6.30am, four hours before court started, in single-digit temperatures. Many of those who crammed into court throughout the trial appeared not unlike Patterson herself: middle aged women with an interest in true crime. Some watchers were obsessed because it was an alleged poisoning case, others because they were from South Gippsland and wanted to see it. There was a man with rainbow coloured hair and a matching coat, who runs a business giving people 'unicorn manes'. A woman who runs a popular true crime Instagram account shared the front row with novelist Helen Garner. There was no other way for the public to follow the case: you had to be in that room, or otherwise dip into the seemingly endless content produced about it (almost all of those in the gallery did both). It is hard to know exactly what made it so popular. It would perhaps be easier to identify what wasn't compelling about it. Surely, a significant element was that this was a woman accused of the unthinkable and judged on different standards, someone who in public sentiment did not grieve in a genuine way, who must be mad or sad or bad or some combination of the three. Of the roughly 40 seats inside court, about half were free for the public, with the rest taken by the Patterson and Wilkinson families, media, and other people associated with the case. Only one supporter of Patterson, her friend and power of attorney, regularly attended court. Patterson spent week nights inside the Morwell police cells. Every day of the trial, she walked about 30 steps along a passageway, no wider than three metres, from the back of the station into the court building. Above her, and to her right, was the patio outside court, where feverish coverage whirred on: witnesses and lawyers and the detective in charge of the investigation, Stephen Eppingstall, ran a gauntlet of photographers and camera operators to get into court every day; reporters completed live crosses; court watchers, having saved a seat upstairs, ducked out for a final smoke before the hearing started. Patterson walked in open-toed rubber sandals, a seemingly curious choice for late autumn and winter in the Latrobe Valley, until you considered how rare it was for her to be outside. On Fridays, she was taken by prison van from Morwell to the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, a prison on the dusty and flat western outskirts of Melbourne. As she left Morwell, and when she returned on Mondays, photographers reached high to firmly press their lenses against the van's tiny compartment windows, not knowing which of these compartments Patterson was in. After the jury retired to consider its verdict, temporary fencing wrapped in black plastic appeared around Patterson's house, where the lunch was held. It seemed an odd thing to have preoccupied Patterson when she was awaiting a verdict on charges of triple murder, to take steps to preserve a sliver of privacy should she walk from court, but the case is nothing if not odd. On Monday, she again made that walk from the police station into court along the concrete passageway, took the lift to the first floor, and, flanked by two corrections officers, stepped through a door into the dock. She would not have to wait long to learn if the jury would send her back the way she came, or whether she would be free to walk into court, to head back to her dream home, to tend her three acres behind her rudimentary fence. Ian Wilkinson, the only guest who sat for lunch at Patterson's dining table on 29 July 2023 and lived, the Baptist Church pastor who stared death in the face, did not come to court to see it.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Here's some Indigenous truth-telling: structural police racism had a hand in the death of Kumanjayi Walker
Coronial inquests are an important form of judicial truth-seeking. The high profile inquest into the police shooting of Warlpiri teenager Kumanjayi Walker at his home in Yuendumu in 2019 has taken three years to forensically investigate the truth of what happened on that day. In findings delivered on Monday, the NT coroner has told us about a racist police officer whose actions went unchecked by a flawed and racist system. Here's something Aboriginal families know to be true: racism kills. Elisabeth Armitage found that former NT constable Zachary Rolfe, who shot and killed Walker in a botched arrest in 2019, was racist. 'Having considered all the evidence, including Mr Rolfe's explanations and justifications, I found that Mr Rolfe was racist and that he worked in, and was the beneficiary of, an organisation with hallmarks of institutional racism,' Armitage said. She said she could not rule out that Rolfe's racism was a factor in the death of Kumanjayi. 'I am satisfied that there is a significant risk that his racism, in combination with some of his other attitudes and values, affected his interactions with the community of Yuendumu on 9 November 2019, his entry into their houses and his perception of and response to the young Aboriginal man he shot and killed in a way that increased the likelihood of a fatal outcome.' She found Rolfe operated in a system that failed on a number of occasions to 'rein him in'. If we are starting to talk about truth telling, here is the truth from where we stand: police racism was a factor in the death of Kumanjayi Walker – not just the racism of an individual officer but the structural racism of the force itself. Armitage and her formidable team, including counsel assisting Dr Peggy Dwyer, have worked hard to forensically document the entire horrific episode. It has taken them more than three years. There were delays to the inquest proceedings brought about by legal challenges from Rolfe's lawyers, including an unsuccessful attempt to have the coroner recuse herself. They investigated every case where Rolfe had used force in an arrest – a total of 12 incidents. In summarising Rolfe's use-of-force history, she noted time after time the 'serious failure' of supervision by senior officers, whose response to Rolfe's conduct was 'wholly inadequate'. She found that officers 'should have shown more leadership'. 'There was a serious failure by senior police (and the systems that support them) to facilitate an adequate and timely investigation into Mr Rolfe, once it emerged that there was a concerningly similar theme to the complaints being made against him; namely, that Mr Rolfe was involved in a number of matters where he did not have his BWV [body-worn video] on at the crucial moment of arrest, many where he was the only officer at the scene at the moment of arrest and where the suspect he arrested suffered a serious injury,' she said. It was incumbent on NT Police to 'take urgent interim action to mitigate the risk to the public while Mr Rolfe was working', either by suspending him from certain duties, or at the very least, ensuring that he was warned and counselled about his suspected behaviour and carefully supervised. She was surprised this did not happen even after a local court judge 'found that Rolfe had probably assaulted an Aboriginal man, causing a head wound that required sutures, and had lied in a statutory declaration and on oath about doing so.' Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email The failure of NT Police to properly supervise Rolfe, or to 'rein him in', as she put it, contributed to the sense of impunity with which he approached his work. 'In my view, the failure of the NT Police to take any action in response to these extremely serious findings represents one of the most serious failures of oversight examined by the inquest,' she said. It is now for the NT police force, and the NT government, to explain to the public why those things did not happen, why Rolfe remained an officer until relatively recently, and whether the changes to procedures and training it told the coroner have taken place since the shooting will be enough to ensure change. These structural problems were so entrenched and longstanding that in 2024, the former NT police commissioner Michael Murphy felt compelled to apologise for the 'harms and the injustices' inflicted by the police on Aboriginal people over the past 154 years. Murphy promised he would go to Yuendumu and apologise in person to the shattered families there. But Murphy was stood down from the force in March, after an Icac investigation, and a replacement is being sought. Yuendumu is not expecting to hear an apology anytime soon. The coroner made 32 recommendations, including support for Yuendumu night patrol, youth services, disability services, mediators and rehabilitation programs. She recommended the NT police engage directly with the Yuendumu leadership groups to develop mutual respect agreements, including 'when it would be appropriate for police not to carry firearms' in the community. She said they are aimed at preventing such a tragedy from happening again. Yet a few weeks ago another young man from Yuendumu, who was in state care due to a disability, died in an Alice Springs supermarket after a botched arrest attempt by off-duty police officers. Armitage and her team will be investigating that death as well. Without systemic change, the truth can be easily stepped over. Walker was killed six years ago. His family has endured a criminal trial, and then protracted inquest hearings, with patience and dignity. Their voices have been hardly heard throughout the entire sorry ordeal. Now, maybe they might be able to speak freely. And alongside their truth-telling and that of the coroner, there must be some listening to what they have to say, and what they think needs to change so they can feel safe in their own homes again. 'Kumanjayi's death has devastated our community. We miss him and feel his loss deeply every single day, it will stain our country for generations to come,' Walker's cousin, Samara Fernandez-Brown, said. 'The inquest into his death has been gruelling, shocking and devastating. Throughout it, our families and communities have stood strong, showed up and listened to all the ways that Kumanjayi was failed. 'We are heartbroken and exhausted after many long years, but we are hoping change is coming. We have faith that the truth will finally be told, and want to see real change so that we can finally start our healing.' Walker's family said late on Monday they are taking the time to process the coroner's findings and will make a full statement and press conference later today. Lorena Allam is descended from the Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay nations of north-western NSW. She is the industry professor of Indigenous media at Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology, Sydney
