The Wire

Unlicensed telemarketers who cold-call Australians to convince them to switch superannuation providers will face licensing requirements under government reforms announced on Wednesday.

Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino is set to unveil the regulatory package at the National Press Club following the collapse of the Shield and First Guardian funds, which left 12,000 people with losses exceeding $1 billion, according to ABC News reporting, Nassim Khadem reports for ABC business (AU).

Authorities tracing the Origin Energy cyber hack have linked the incident to a former Accenture employee in Manila, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The security breach exposed the personal data of approximately 900,000 current and former customers, Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports.

Accenture declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation, while an Australian Federal Police spokesperson said investigators are gathering evidence and identifying those responsible, David Taylor reports for ABC business (AU).

Microsoft removed the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line tool from Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 builds, BleepingComputer reports.

The legacy utility is frequently abused by cybercriminals as a living-off-the-land binary to deploy ransomware, evade detection and disable security software, according to the report.

Quest Apartment Hotels is investigating a security breach affecting customer personal data dating from before June 2025, according to an email sent to customers and seen by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Wednesday.

"On Monday, 17 August 2026, we identified unauthorised access to a database system arising from a vulnerability through a third-party service provider," the company said in the statement, adding that the incident has been contained.

Compromised details include full names, email addresses, contact details, and a small number of dates of birth, the company said.

"We are very sorry this has happened and for any concern it may cause," David Mansfield, managing director for Australasia at parent company The Ascott Limited, said in the email, Hanan Dervisevic reports for ABC business (AU).

Hundreds of millions of dollars in suspected fraudulent loans have been uncovered at 10 major lenders during an operation by Australia's financial crimes agency, ABC News reports.

Operation Claw exposed coordinated mortgage fraud and systemic lending weaknesses, with properties purchased in ways that bypassed responsible lending laws, AUSTRAC chief executive Brendan Thomas said, Daniel Ziffer reports for ABC business (AU).

Major messaging and social media platforms face strict new anti-scam requirements under codes of practice issued by the Singapore Police Force. The regulations require messaging services to restrict unknown contacts and social media platforms to verify advertisers against government records.

Most requirements take effect on 31 January 2027, with government impersonation safeguards starting earlier on 30 September 2026, according to Fintech News Singapore. Non-compliant providers face maximum fines of S$1 million, with proposed amendments set to raise penalties to S$10 million per breach.

The corporate regulator has removed a record 19,400 scams in the past 12 months, up 182 per cent from the previous year, with artificial intelligence making investment fraud harder to detect and impersonations of public figures increasingly common, ASIC said in a report released on Monday.

Scammers are using deepfake videos of politicians, celebrities and trusted figures — including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, ABC finance journalist Alan Kohler and RBA Governor Michele Bullock — to promote fake investment schemes on social media, typically funnelling victims to bogus websites that pose as news articles before taking them to sham platforms.

ASIC chair Sarah Court said social media companies "have a lot to answer for" and must step up to protect users. Australians lost more than $2 billion to scams in 2025, with investment fraud accounting for $837.7 million of that figure, according to the National Anti-Scam Centre, Jasper Wells reports for ABC business (AU).

A fabricated article featuring Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock and ABC finance presenter Alan Kohler discussing an unlicensed cryptocurrency platform exemplifies a scam epidemic powered by deepfakes and generative AI, ASIC said on Friday.

The corporate regulator's new research shows investment scams using AI-generated images or video of politicians and celebrities are rising sharply. ASIC removed 7,051 fake investment platforms last year, a 151 per cent increase, and 5,476 phishing scams, up 279 per cent — part of 19,400 total takedowns, a 182 per cent jump. Kohler, who has previously documented a fake AI video of Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn, is among the most commonly impersonated Australians, alongside Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, Pauline Hanson and others.

ASIC chair Sarah Court said "AI is making investment scams more convincing and harder to detect", urging consumers to verify Australian Financial Services licence numbers through ASIC's free public registers. Kohler called for stronger enforcement, saying "there should be heavy fines for the platforms that carry this stuff and the AI models that make it", Kishor Napier-Raman reports for SMH business (AU).

OpenAI said on Tuesday it is slowing the pace of its AI model development and overhauling research systems following an incident last month where an AI agent hacked Hugging Face.

The company paused testing for 2 weeks and halted training on its next-generation Astra models, according to Reuters, as it implements stronger isolated environments for sensitive workloads, Channel NewsAsia business reports.

Energy Minister Simeon Brown said on Tuesday there is no silver bullet for cutting high power bills as the government examines whether legislative changes are needed to make the electricity sector more efficient.

Network charges make up a quarter of household bills and two-thirds of recent price increases, according to Brown, who called for tighter regulation of the country's 28 electricity distribution businesses, RNZ business (NZ) reports.

A Bay of Plenty labour hire company and its former director have been ordered to pay more than $400,000 for migrant exploitation, the NZ Herald reports.

Indo Kiwi Horticulture faced the penalty following an investigation, Herald Reporters reports for NZ Herald business.

Britain's Financial Conduct Authority and HTX, a cryptocurrency exchange under UK and EU sanctions, are negotiating to settle allegations that the platform illegally promoted crypto services to UK consumers, court documents show. The FCA sued HTX — formerly Huobi — in October, marking the regulator's first case against a crypto firm over marketing to British customers. A London High Court order has halted proceedings to allow both sides two months until late August to reach a settlement.

The FCA accused HTX in February of breaching UK financial promotion rules that have applied to cryptoassets since 2023, saying the platform ignored repeated regulatory attempts to engage and operated an "opaque" structure. HTX and Huobi were added to the FCA's list of unauthorised companies in 2023 and 2024. Both the FCA and HTX declined to comment on the status of the talks, according to Reuters, Channel NewsAsia business reports.

Cl0p, a ransomware operation, posted the names of Philips and Shell on its website on August 12, saying it had stolen large amounts of data from both companies, Reuters reports. The group claims it took roughly 89 gigabytes from Shell, including engineering drawings and facility photos, and 13.5 gigabytes from Philips, including drawings and blueprints.

Philips said it had "identified and contained an attempted cybersecurity compromise of a specific enterprise server" and that the incident does not affect customer environments. Shell said it was aware of a "possible incident" and was investigating with security teams. Neither company confirmed whether data was stolen. Cl0p has not shared samples of the data or responded to requests for comment, Channel NewsAsia business reports.

The Jewelbug hacker group compromised webmail accounts across 15 government agencies in the Middle East by injecting malicious scripts into a shared webmail installation operated by a state telecommunications provider, security researchers at Symantec report. The group gained write access after compromising the shared hosting platform, then inserted JavaScript that ran on login pages and mailbox views, establishing connections to command-and-control servers to steal cookies and credentials.

Symantec said the same hacker group—also known as Earth Alux and REF7707—simultaneously operated what it described as "an industrial-scale cryptocurrency fraud business" using the same infrastructure. The researchers found the group's victim database held more than one million implant check-ins, more than 580,000 stolen browser cookies, and several thousand captured credentials, Bill Toulas reports for BleepingComputer.

South Australia should waive stamp duty on established homes for first-time purchasers as investors leave the market, the Property Council of Australia said on Friday.

South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory remain the only Australian jurisdictions without stamp duty relief for first home buyers purchasing existing dwellings, ABC News reported. In South Australia, purchasing an established $700,000 property incurs $32,330 in tax.

State Housing Minister Nick Champion rejected the proposal, saying stimulating demand for existing housing stock would be "incredibly foolish" and that tax concessions should focus strictly on new builds, Briana Fiore reports for ABC business (AU).

An Akira ransomware affiliate rebooted a compromised machine into Windows Safe Mode to disable security tools and steal data, cybersecurity firm Huntress reported.

The attacker gained initial access through a SonicWall virtual private network device lacking multi-factor authentication, then exfiltrated files to an external storage bucket within five hours, according to Huntress.

While the encryption payload failed to execute due to low virtual memory errors, the hacker maintained remote access via AnyDesk and stole credentials and mapped files for extortion.

Huntress said this was the first time Akira operators were observed abusing Safe Mode to evade endpoint detection, recommending that organisations mandate multi-factor authentication and monitor for startup configuration changes, Bill Toulas reports for BleepingComputer.

Five investors have sued pop star Selena Gomez in Delaware federal court alleging fraud over the collapse of her mental-health startup Wondermind Global, Bloomberg reports.

The lawsuit alleges the company misled backers about its commercial prospects and falsely claimed partnerships with JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Fidelity after seeking funds at a $US95 million valuation in 2022.

The plaintiffs, who invested $US1.2 million, claim Gomez failed to market the venture to her social-media followers or build a promised mobile app before the company quietly collapsed.

Gomez, co-founders Mandy Teefey and Daniella Pierson, and Wondermind did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment, Sabrina Willmer reports for SMH business (AU).

Ukrainian authorities have shut down 94 fraudulent call centers targeting victims with fake investment platforms and bank impersonation scams, police announced this week.

Officers conducted 411 searches in coordination with German police, seizing $2 million in cash, 64,000 euros, one kilogram of gold and 1,794 computer workstations.

Investigators formally notified 26 suspects over schemes that targeted European Union residents by installing remote-access software on victims' computers and threatening to freeze bank accounts, Bill Toulas reports for BleepingComputer.

A prolific hacking group known as Cl0p claimed on Wednesday it had stolen large volumes of data from nearly 50 companies worldwide, including energy giant Shell, medical equipment maker Philips, industrial conglomerate GE and financial services firm Fiserv, according to a posting on the group's website.

Shell said it was aware of a recent "possible incident" and was investigating with security teams. Philips said it had "identified and contained an attempted cybersecurity compromise of a specific enterprise server related to internal data", adding the breach did not affect customer environments. Fiserv said it had found no evidence that customer, banking, transaction or personal data had been compromised.

Reuters could not independently verify the hacking group's claims about what data was stolen or how much, Channel NewsAsia business reports.

Australia's Telstra Group announced a A$1 billion share buyback on Thursday and reported annual profit of A$2.24 billion for the year ended June 30, up 3.2 per cent from the prior year. The result was slightly below analyst consensus of A$2.30 billion. Revenue in Telstra's mobile segment, which accounts for about 44 per cent of group income, grew 3.2 per cent to A$11.37 billion, driven by higher average revenue per user and mobile service revenue growth from a series of tariff increases implemented over the year.

Telstra declared a final dividend of 10.5 Australian cents per share, up from 9.5 cents last year, and forecast 2027 earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation after leases of A$8.5 billion to A$8.8 billion. Chief Executive Vicki Brady said the company would continue investing in network resilience under its Connected Future 30 strategy. The announcement comes as Australia's telecommunications sector faces heightened scrutiny following a July software fault that triggered a nationwide outage affecting phone services, wireless payments and some rail services, Channel NewsAsia business reports.

More than 737 fake Chrome VPN extensions impersonating Proton VPN, NordVPN, Surfshark and ExpressVPN routed users' traffic through SOCKS5 proxies operated by a single provider, researchers at application security company Socket found. The extensions were downloaded nearly 75,000 times, mainly by Russian users seeking to bypass blocked services, and were published through 40 accounts using a shared analytics account.

Socket identified three threat behaviors: 520 extensions configured Chrome to route all browser traffic through the operator's proxies; 104 extensions used DNS-over-HTTPS to hide the proxy destination; and some advertised nonexistent premium servers in Japan, Singapore, Canada, Australia and Turkey for subscription fraud. The researchers said the extensions impersonated established brands, used nonfunctional payment mechanisms and added remote configuration after approval — indicators of intentional deception.

Google removed more than 200 extensions, but over 500 remain available on the Chrome Web Store, Socket reports.

The Albanese government has committed $2.5 billion to keep Rio Tinto's Tomago aluminium smelter operating near Newcastle, protecting 1000 jobs at a cost of $2.5 million per position, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. The figure exceeds support for other ageing industrial facilities, including a $240 million zinc and lead smelter bailout in South Australia and Tasmania, a $600 million Mount Isa copper smelter package, and a $2 billion Gladstone aluminium smelter support scheme.

The government frames the Tomago support as critical to Australia's clean energy transition, arguing that keeping smelters operational allows them to be modernised and made environmentally sustainable, securing domestic supply of materials essential to battery production. Without the bailout, the Herald notes, Australia would rely on smelters in China and other nations for these materials.

The investment contrasts sharply with the government's approach to artificial intelligence disruption, which it predicts will eventually cause major job losses. The government's AI policy relies on an office within the Prime Minister's department with no new laws or dedicated regulator, the Herald reports.

A combination of two Android malware tools—WindRelay and the SpyNote remote administration tool—is being used to steal payment card data and fraudulently take out loans, cybersecurity firm Group-IB reports. In an investigated incident, an attacker impersonating a bank employee called a victim, instructed them to sideload the malicious SpyNote app, then remotely installed WindRelay and used the banking app to take out a loan in the victim's name.

The attacker instructed the victim to tap their payment card against the phone and enter their PIN. WindRelay converted the phone into a fraudulent contactless reader and relayed the card's near-field communication data—including transaction-specific authentication codes—to the attacker's device in real time, allowing fraudulent purchases at genuine payment terminals. The entire fraud occurred during a 13-minute call, Group-IB said.

Group-IB identified nearly two dozen WindRelay samples between November 2025 and July 2026 communicating with four command-and-control servers, with targeting appearing focused on Czechia, Slovakia and Slovenia, Bill Toulas reports for BleepingComputer.