Threat actors known as ALTDOS continue to romp their way through attacks on ASEAN entities, garnering very little media attention as they acquire and dump millions of consumer records and proprietary information on businesses. The majority of the victims whose data they have dumped appear to be from Singapore and Thailand, but they do have victims in other countries as well.
While they have tended to fly under the media radar, ALTDOS has not gone unnoticed by Singapore law enforcement. The Singapore government recently issued a joint advisory on ALTDOS. That advisory did not save one of Malaysia’s biggest conglomerates from becoming a victim, however.
Sunway Group claims to be one of Malaysia’s largest conglomerates with core interests in real estate, construction, education, healthcare, retail, and hospitality. They have 13 business divisions, more than 50 locations worldwide, and 16,000 employees.
On September 15, ALTDOS contacted DataBreaches.net to claim responsibility for a hack of Sunway Group or Sunway Berhad.
Due to no-response for the last 72 hours from Sunway Group, we will dump out part of their student data under sunway.edu.my in less than 12 hours time. More data leaks from Sunway Group will be made known.
ALTDOS enclosed links to a file-sharing site where they had uploaded two files as proof of acquisition of data.
One of the two files was a spread sheet with personal information on 1,000 students and their parents. The fields included what form (grade) the student was in, their name, IC, email address, phone number, state, and school, as well as parental information including the parent’s name, email address, and contact phone number. The data had entry dates of 2021 for the most part.
DataBreaches.net did not attempt to contact either students or parents or to test any email addresses or phone numbers, but a simple Google search did find individuals who matched the parents’ names, and Sunway does have an international school that covers the grades in question. The international schools are owned and governed by the Jeffrey Cheah Foundation.
On September 17 and 18, DataBreaches.net used Sunway’s on-site contact form to send them inquiries asking Sunway to confirm or deny ALTDOS’s claims. An inquiry was also sent to the Jeffrey Cheah Foundation through their web site yesterday. No response has been received by the time of this publication to any of the inquiries.
DataBreaches.net did not find where, if anywhere, ALTDOS has publicly dumped any Sunway data as they had threatened to do, but ALTDOS has a pattern of using different paste sites or forums, not all of which are known or readily discoverable by DataBreaches.net.
ALTDOS’s Past Incidents
In alphabetical order, ALTDOS’s known/claimed victims:
- AudioHouse – one of Singapore’s largest electronic retailers
- Bangladesh Export Import Company Limited(“BEXIMCO”) – multinational conglomerate
- Country Group Securities (CGSEC) – a Thai securities firm
- MonoNext and 3BB, subsidiaries of Jasmine International – a Thai media and content conglomerate
- OrangeTee and OTGroup – Singapore real estate group
- Unispec Group Singapore – marine industry services
- Ventura Securities Ltd. – a stock trading/investment management firm in India. This one was never reported publicly at the time (March, 2021) although proof of claim had been sent to DataBreaches.net; Ventura did not respond to inquiries.
- vHive – Singapore furniture retailer whose online ordering has been nonfunctioning since March.
As DataBreaches.net previously reported, some of ALTDOS’s servers were recently taken down. They tell DataBreaches.net that they have no idea what authority was responsible for that, but that the takedown occurred shortly after their communication to OrangeTee. No substantive reply has been received to an inquiry sent to the data protection commissioner’s office asking if they were responsible for the takedown.