Valuation firm Herron Todd White reports data breach

Herron Todd White (HTW), a national valuation firm in Australia, is reporting a data breach that impacted its commercial and agricultural property valuation platforms. The breach was detected on Friday, 5th of April 2024 and was reported to the Australian Cyber Security Centre.

Westpac, National Australia Bank, and Commonwealth Bank have taken measures to halt new valuation work sent to HTW, with the latter two specifically suspending commercial and agricultural valuation work but not residential valuations, as they are conducted on a different platform unaffected by the breach. ANZ has also reportedly suspended all new work with HTW, though there was no direct comment from the bank.

The specifics of the breach, including how it occurred and whether it was a malicious attack, misconfiguration or a human error have not been disclosed. No details are available about exposed data or number of affected individuals.

Update - Unnamed sources claim that information about former employees of HTW may have been compromised by the data breach. No other details are available about the breach.

On 27th of April the BlackSuit ransomware gang claimed responsibility for the HTW attack, and claim they had exfiltrated data from the company. The data they claim to have includes 279 gigabytes of paperwork and a 20-gigabyte SQL database containing customer and transaction information. Additionally, they compiled a 3.3-gigabyte ZIP archive of valuable documents as proof of the hack. However, attempts to access this file were unsuccessful as the hosting site reported that the download limit for the file had been reached.