Services Australia Breach Incident Score: Analysis & Impact (SER1765340155)

In this Rankiteo incident briefing, we review the Services Australia breach identified under incident ID SER1765340155.

The analysis begins with a detailed overview of Services Australia's information like the linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/services-australia, the number of followers: 106789, the industry type: Government Administration and the number of employees: 7701 employees

After the initial compromise, the video explains how Rankiteo's incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score. The incident score before the incident was 778 and after the incident was 710 with a difference of -68 which is could be a good indicator of the severity and impact of the incident.

In the next step of the video, we will analyze in more details the incident and the impact it had on Services Australia and their customers.

Services Australia recently reported "Services Australia Third-Party Data Breach Notification Powers", a noteworthy cybersecurity incident.

Services Australia may gain new powers to compel third-parties to disclose data breaches involving government identifiers quickly.

The disruption is felt across the environment, and exposing Personal information, myGov sign-in credentials and Medicare numbers.

In response, teams activated the incident response plan, and stakeholders are being briefed through Data breach mailout service (since June 2025).

The case underscores how Ongoing, teams are taking away lessons such as Need for timely breach notifications, centralized breach monitoring, and legislative authority to compel third-party disclosures, and recommending next steps like Implement legislative reforms to compel third-parties to notify Services Australia of breaches involving government identifiers, Improve internal breach assessment processes to comply with the 30-day statutory timeframe and Continue evaluating the effectiveness of the data breach mailout service, with advisories going out to stakeholders covering Data breach mailout service (since June 2025).

Finally, we try to match the incident with the MITRE ATT&CK framework to see if there is any correlation between the incident and the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework is a knowledge base of techniques and sub-techniques that are used to describe the tactics and procedures of cyber adversaries. It is a powerful tool for understanding the threat landscape and for developing effective defense strategies.

Rankiteo's analysis has identified several MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques associated with this incident, each with varying levels of confidence based on available evidence. Under the Initial Access tactic, the analysis identified Phishing (T1566) with high confidence (95%), supported by evidence indicating primarily driven by phishing attacks where individuals unknowingly shared credentials and Valid Accounts: Cloud Accounts (T1078.004) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating customers inadvertently providing... myGov credentials to impersonators. Under the Credential Access tactic, the analysis identified Unsecured Credentials: Credentials In Files (T1552.001) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating third-parties holding Medicare and Centrelink identifiers are a problematic attack vector and Brute Force (T1110) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating malicious or criminal actors (implied credential abuse after phishing). Under the Exfiltration tactic, the analysis identified Data from Cloud Storage (T1530) with moderate to high confidence (85%), supported by evidence indicating data breaches involving government identifiers (Medicare/Centrelink numbers) and Exfiltration Over C2 Channel (T1041) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating identity theft risk such as High (implies data exfiltration). Under the Defense Evasion tactic, the analysis identified Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools (T1562.001) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating 71% of NDBs reported 50+ days after detection (delayed internal assessments). These correlations help security teams understand the attack chain and develop appropriate defensive measures based on the observed tactics and techniques.