Qantas cyber attack hits 6m customers & ASX closes at another record

The 2008,597. We'll have the details with Martin Lakos from Macquarie Private Bank in a few moments. But first to Qantas, which has apologised for a cyber breach. The incident happened on Monday, but customers were only told about it today. 6 million of them have had their names, email addresses, birth dates, phone, and frequent flyer numbers.

RICARDO GONÇALVES

Accessed after the airline detected unusual activity on a third party platform used by a contact centre in Manila. The platform, however, didn't store credit card, personal financial information or passport details. No frequent flyer accounts, passwords or pins were compromised, and there was no impact to its operations or safety of the airline. Investigations are ongoing.

RICARDO GONÇALVES

Although there have been similar attacks on other large global companies, so for more, I spoke with Daswin De Silva, professor at La Trobe University. Dustin, how serious do you see this type of breach to be and why do you think these scammers wanted this type of data?

DASWIN DE SILVA

Thanks, Ricardo. So I think it is quite a serious cyberattack because these.

DASWIN DE SILVA

A fairly successful track record of this scattered spider type of attacks across different sectors, starting with the casinos in the US in 2023 and then in the UK with Marks and Spencer, Transport for London and then more recently in the last 4 days there was some commentary on Hawaiian Airlines and United Airlines having

DASWIN DE SILVA

Disruption to their services, it has to be taken seriously, because of also the less sophisticated nature of the type of method used for these attacks, which is social engineering or impersonation.

DASWIN DE SILVA

Manipulating the help desk really of fairly large organisations that have multiple business functions that are spread across third party providers.

DASWIN DE SILVA

Definitely a lot to investigate and ensure that other sectors where there are large organisations with a very large help desk service and a large customer base are also not compromised.

RICARDO GONÇALVES

I think Qantas said that this happened on a third party platform overseas at one of its call centres, right? Is there anything that Qantas could have done to mitigate it?

DASWIN DE SILVA

Qantas have fairly, advanced, data governance frameworks and cybersecurity adherence frameworks and committees, oversight committees, and so on. I believe Qantas could explore how these are also implemented across their third party providers. Sometimes third party outsourcing parts of the business operations comes at a cost saving.

DASWIN DE SILVA

But this could also mean that some of those third party providers are not adhering to the same cybersecurity safeguards, best practises as the parent company. This could be a challenge for large organisations in terms of managing the cost advantage, but also ensuring that data security, data privacy, confidentiality of data is also safeguarded. This is one area that they can look into a lot closer.

DASWIN DE SILVA

And the second one is in terms of not notifying customers of the breach. There was a significant time lag between when they observed disruption to service or unusual activity on Monday, but the notifications happened on Wednesday, so about 48 hours for further secondary attacks that are more targeted. This data was not.

DASWIN DE SILVA

Financially valuable and from the looks of it, scattered spider is a financially motivated threat actor.

DASWIN DE SILVA

And they could use this information, which is still identifiable to send out further attacks that would compromise customers individually. That's one of the other risks.

RICARDO GONÇALVES

You've mentioned scattered spider a couple of times for those that aren't initiated that don't understand it, can you tell us what it means?

DASWIN DE SILVA

This is a group of hackers or threat actors, that based on information available, are based in the US and the UK, seems to be a fairly,

DASWIN DE SILVA

Novel, cyberattack group because they're using, simple techniques compared to some of the other attacks we've seen in the recent past.

DASWIN DE SILVA

The technique, the main technique is social engineering or impersonation attacks where phishing attacks, SIM swapping and multi-factor authentication, fatigue attacks. They're trying to manipulate the help desk function of a large organisation where the help desk has a different KPI because they want to serve, they want to make sure that

DASWIN DE SILVA

The password is reset as quickly as possible and as safely as possible, but given their KPI is a faster service from start to end, this can be manipulated in terms of how much information they have and how frequently they try to intrude into how the help desk functions. Scattered spider could be an organisation that is distributed across countries or it could be just

DASWIN DE SILVA

A type of techniques adopted by different groups and this type of techniques. There were some arrests in 2024 following the breaches in the US, but they seem to have improvised from what happened in the US into the UK and now in Australia.

RICARDO GONÇALVES

That is Darwin da Silva there from La Trobe University.

RICARDO GONÇALVES

Now, market day on the SBS on the Money podcast. Good day for the Australian share market, the S&P ASX 200 up 0.66% to a record high, 8,597. It was weaker in the morning.

RICARDO GONÇALVES

Only really rallying after lunchtime, so to find out why and plenty more, I spoke with Martin Lakos from Macquarie. Martin, so the Australian share market was falling throughout the morning but has really recovered and rally in the afternoon. Why?

MARTIN LAKOS

Pretty strong rally, Ricardo, particularly in the resources space, at the current level as we speak, should the market close at these levels, it's going to be a new all-time closing high. But of course we continue to see volatility, and to some extent the Australian market has well and truly lagged the strong rally in the US markets over the last week or so. You might have an inference there, the market is starting to get a bit tired, certainly been seen a very strong rebound obviously.

MARTIN LAKOS

We were down about 14% through Liberation Day in April, we've recovered all of those losses. So again, a pretty strong rebound. The question of course is where to from here, and I think the market's obviously going to be waiting to see next week what the Australian Reserve Bank decides to do on interest rates.

RICARDO GONÇALVES

Bill, I mean, how much are overseas events weighing on investor sentiment?

MARTIN LAKOS

There's still an amount of caution, although you wouldn't have thought so with the way the US markets have rallied, but particularly in light of, we still don't know the blowback effect of the tariffs. Clearly we saw, in a run up to the tariffs, a huge amount of activity, inventory building in the United States. We're now past that. We would actually have an expectation that the US economy will start to soften some.

MARTIN LAKOS

We don't expect to see a recession, but certainly we would expect that the impact of tariffs will start to see a slowdown and will probably be a global phenomenon. That's something the central banks are going to be starting to deal with as well. Are they really going to continue to be focused on inflation, or does the growth side start to take a bit of priority? We think certainly shorter term, a

MARTIN LAKOS

Growth side will take that priority and so we have an expectation of further rate cuts later this

RICARDO GONÇALVES

year. Now what about Australia though? I saw some interesting analysis from the team at Mornings Day yesterday that claim that the cost of living crisis is coming to an end amid falling interest rates. Today we saw a 0.2% bounce back in retail sales in May, even though that was softer than expected. What do you think?

MARTIN LAKOS

It's hard to get really excited about what the households are doing at this point in time. There's absolutely no doubt that the rate cuts we've had so far are assisting both the household budget and improving sentiment somewhat. But the retail sales numbers today that you mentioned were actually very mixed. In fact, we had weaker components out of food, but slightly stronger in things like clothing and footwear.

MARTIN LAKOS

That may well be seasonal, given we've moved into the winter months as well. But I think to put that in perspective, that 0.2 of 1% rise through May—so it's only a monthly number—was well below expectations, which were looking for about a 0.5% rise. So again, it certainly suggests that things are still soft and that volume growth in retail continues to soften as well.

RICARDO GONÇALVES

Interesting to see the market turnaround today and that, as you were mentioning, some of the materials stocks, resources, bouncing back. The Commonwealth Bank was down for a fifth day in a row earlier today after hitting records as well. There's a lot of analysis about the Commonwealth Bank potentially being really overvalued.

RICARDO GONÇALVES

Are we starting to see a rotation from the financial sector to the resources sector? Is this an early sign perhaps?

MARTIN LAKOS

We don't think there's probably evidence yet of a decided or definite rotation, although the resources sector looks very good value. It's obviously down, and there is a question mark around global growth, whether commodity prices can bounce back anytime soon. But when we look at the banks—particularly compare Commonwealth Bank

MARTIN LAKOS

either internationally or to a domestic comparison such as National Australia Bank—it really does look very expensive. To give you an example, Commonwealth Bank is on 4.1 times price to book value. National Australia Bank is about 1.9 times. So Commonwealth Bank is almost double on that valuation criteria. If we look at price to earnings, again, almost double. NAB is on 17 times on our numbers,

MARTIN LAKOS

the Commonwealth Bank on about 30 times. That provides a much better dividend yield for investors at 4.3%, versus Commonwealth Bank at 2.4%. But the rally in the Commonwealth Bank share price—there does seem to be a lot of international support, particularly given the huge investment that Commonwealth Bank has had in technology and the benefits of that going forward. But we do think it looks overvalued and we've had an underperform on the stock for a while.

RICARDO GONÇALVES

And finally, what are you telling your clients right now, and are there any opportunities for investors?

MARTIN LAKOS

Given that we're now near all-time highs for the Australian market and the US markets are very strong, we remain cautious. There's no question about that. We do have an expectation of increased volatility, potentially an economic slowdown—not recession—but certainly a growth slowdown. So we've really been allocating funds for clients, or recommending, to be looking at alternative assets,

MARTIN LAKOS

particularly such as private credit, infrastructure. These are assets that are long-term investments—what we call long duration—and don't tend to get impacted as much by day-to-day volatility. That gives you a suggestion, Ricardo, that we remain cautious on markets. But overall, given that interest rates are coming down, we do expect possibly another 50 basis points coming off in the US,

MARTIN LAKOS

certainly another 75 basis points coming down in Australian interest rates. That's going to be supportive of risk assets such as shares. So we're playing it cautiously, but we recognise that the growth might continue through 2026.

RICARDO GONÇALVES

That is Martin Laos there from Macquarie. That is the podcast, don't forget to give it a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and to give it a subscribe.

END OF TRANSCRIPT