When a major cyber incident hits, the discussion often centers on the technical exploits. However, the recent Qantas data breach—which exposed data belonging to 5.7 million customers—highlights a far more insidious problem for cybersecurity professionals: the blurring line between a direct breach and a supply chain failure, and the resultant accountability crisis.
The Qantas incident links to wider campaigns and has implications for organizational accountability and data sovereignty.
The Qantas incident, confirmed by the airline, involved a significant compromise resulting in the publication of customer data online. The affected data included a range of personal information, potentially affecting both current and former frequent flyers. Qantas publicly stated it was engaging with impacted customers and providing relevant support services.
Crucially, the attack was not a traditional, front-door breach of Qantas's core flight systems. Instead, the incident appears to be tied to a compromise within its supply chain, specifically an external platform used for customer and loyalty program management. This external vector links the Qantas breach to the broader activities of the notorious cybercrime group ShinyHunters, and the fallout from the compromise of systems hosted on Salesforce.
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For cybersecurity teams, this emphasizes a core truth: you can have world-class perimeter defenses, but your risk is always defined by the weakest link in your digital ecosystem.
"The Qantas data leak was a result of a Salesforce breach that also affected other major companies, including Disney, Google, IKEA, Toyota, and McDonald's. This incident is a classic example of a supply chain attack, where the attackers, in this case the hacker collective Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, targeted the service provider Salesforce, gaining access to sensitive data from multiple high-value organizations," said Boris Cipot, Senior Security Engineer at Black Duck. "Although the attackers did not access passport or financial data, affected customers should remain vigilant. The leaked information includes names, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and frequent flyer details, which can be used for phishing and social engineering attacks."
Cipot continued, "To stay safe, affected customers should refrain from sharing private information or passwords, avoid clicking on URLs sent via email or SMS and be cautious of fake voice calls, including vishing attacks that use AI-altered voices to impersonate known individuals."
"Google has warned about the increasing prevalence of vishing attacks, which have been observed in attacks targeting Qantas," he added. "By being aware of these risks and taking these precautions, customers can significantly reduce their vulnerability to phishing and social engineering campaigns."
ShinyHunters is renowned for large-scale data theft and subsequent sale of that data on underground forums. The attack vector often involves exploiting vulnerabilities in external, non-core services that hold massive amounts of user data.
When the Qantas data appeared online, it confirmed the gravity of the supply chain risk. Many enterprises, including Qantas, rely on robust platforms like Salesforce for critical CRM, marketing, and loyalty program functions. When a threat actor successfully compromises a multi-tenant cloud environment or a third-party application built on it, the blast radius affects every customer using that compromised service.
This scenario forces security leaders to ask: How do we apply the principles of Zero Trust to vendors who hold our most sensitive customer PII?
"Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters are almost certainly feeding all of the information about every individual they have ever stolen information about into an AI system, then asking that AI system to scan the internet and other resources for additional information about all of them. With enough information, they can rapidly develop a deep understanding of any person and any company," said Andy Bennett, CISO at Apollo Information Systems. "From there, it is trivial to create custom attacks targeting thousands of specific individuals across tens or hundreds of organizations at a time. The threats organizations face today from attackers, such as Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, is orders of magnitude greater than the threats we were all facing just a few years ago. The speed of innovation on the part of the attackers is vastly outpacing the abilities of traditional cybersecurity programs."
The Qantas incident also sparked a public debate on executive accountability. News coverage highlighted that despite the severe cyber failure and massive customer impact, the airline's CEO received a significant bonus—though lower than expected.
For the security community, this raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: Does the current corporate structure adequately penalize failure in cyber risk management?
Cybersecurity is an operational and financial risk, yet executive compensation is often insulated from the consequences of a major data loss event, particularly when the breach is attributed to a third-party vendor. This structural disconnect can disincentivize robust investment in vendor risk management, security diligence, and proactive breach preparedness.
Implications for CISOs:
Quantify third-party risk in financial terms: Security leaders must move beyond audit checklists. Quantify the potential regulatory fines, clean-up costs, and reputational damage associated with each critical vendor, and use that data in budget negotiations.
Integrate risk into executive KPIs: Advocate for cyber resilience metrics—such as time to detect, time to recover, and successful incident response drills—to be integrated into executive key performance indicators (KPIs) and compensation plans.
The Qantas breach is a sobering reminder that sophisticated threats will continue to find the path of least resistance. To harden defenses against the next supply chain attack:
Enforce strict data minimization: Review every third-party contract. Does the vendor truly need all 5.7 million records, or can the data set be restricted? Less data shared means less data to lose.
Decouple and de-scope: Implement strict network and identity segmentation so that a compromise in one vendor's system cannot laterally move into your core infrastructure.
Focus on recovery: As Zimperium's research on ClayRat malware suggests, the focus must be on dynamic detection. Similarly, for cloud services, prepare for the inevitable compromise by frequently testing recovery plans and ensuring data integrity and rapid rollback capabilities.
"More enterprises are accelerating their adoption of application development platforms, like Salesforce, drawn by their scalability and rapid innovation potential. However, relying solely on these platforms to provide 360-degree security is a dangerous fallacy," said Dominic Tippabattuni, Associate Principal Consultant at Black Duck. "The Qantas breach is a stark reminder that even when the underlying platform remains uncompromised, misconfigurations, weak integrations, insecure extensions, and insufficient oversight can expose millions of records. This elevates the need for a shared responsibility model, where providers secure the core infrastructure, but enterprises retain accountability for data protection, access controls, and secure development practices."