The July data breach at U.S. insurance giant Allianz Life allowed hackers to steal the personal information of 1.1 million customers, according to data breach notification site Have I Been Pwned.<\/p>\n
Allianz Life disclosed the data breach in late July, confirming that hackers stole the personal information of the \u201cmajority\u201d of its 1.4 million customers<\/a> and its employees from a cloud-stored customer relationship database. Allianz has so far refused to confirm exactly how many people are affected by the breach.<\/p>\n Have I Been Pwned, a data breach notification site<\/a> that alerts people when their email address has been caught up in data breaches, said in a post on Monday<\/a> the Allianz Life breach includes customers\u2019 names, gender, date of birth, email and home addresses, and phone numbers from a database hosted by cloud giant Salesforce.<\/p>\n Allianz Life later told the states of Texas and Massachusetts the hackers also stole Social Security numbers<\/a> in the breach.<\/p>\n Brett Weinberg, a spokesperson for Allianz Life, declined to comment to TechCrunch as the company\u2019s investigation is ongoing.<\/p>\n Allianz Life is one of a series of tech and corporate giants that have been targeted in recent months by a hacking crew known as ShinyHunters, a group known for their social engineering skills aimed at tricking employees into granting them access to the company\u2019s databases.<\/p>\n Google<\/a>, Cisco<\/a>, airline giant Qantas<\/a>, and retailer Pandora<\/a> \u2014 and also HR giant Workday, as reported by TechCrunch on Monday<\/a> \u2014 have also reported recent data thefts related to their Salesforce-hosted data.<\/p>\n The ShinyHunters gang is said to be preparing a data leak site in an attempt to extort victims into paying the hackers to delete the data, a tactic often employed by ransomware gangs. The group reportedly overlaps with other hacking and crime groups, <\/a>including Scattered Spider<\/a> and The Com<\/a>, a known collective of cybercriminals who use hacking, extortion, and sometimes threats of violence to break into networks.<\/p>\n