Data breach: Sydney IT freelancer in custody
A 49-year-old freelancer from Sydney is being charged for stealing 170,000 data records from his client, for which he was working for more than 10 years.
According to the charges, the data were stolen between September 2017 and May 2019 from his client, the ASX-listed property valuation firm LandMark White Ltd.
NSW Cybercrime Squad helped to establish 24 charges against Stephen Grant from Rozelle. The charges include dealing with identification of information, unauthorised database access, unauthorised modification of data and impairing data communications. Grant is alleged to have uploaded the personal information of 275,000 people to the "Dark Web", and the file-sharing site Scribd. Police said the details included names, addresses, contact numbers, email addresses and driver´s licences.
Grant was arrested and charged in October following a three month investigation by the cybercrime squad. He has been refused bail.
LandMark White repeatedly announced the breaches which resulted in their share price toppling. The prosecutor indicated that Grants" criminality has almost crippled a company to the value of $8 million." The company is currently trading at 14 cents which is about one third of what it was one year ago. LandMark White has in the meantime rebranded into Acumentis.
Following the arrest of Grant, several raids at an Ultimo data centre were carried out by the cybercrime squad to seize servers, computers, laptops, and storage devices.
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This article was published in the Australia Freelance Market News 79.