Hacker reveals stolen Aussie Travel Cover data is corrupted

Customers of insurer Aussie Travel Cover appear to have escaped having their personal information disseminated on the internet, after the hacked database posted online turned out to be unreadable.

Speaking to iTnews via instant messaging, the 16-year old who claimed responsibility for the attack, "Abdilo" (an anagram of Diablo), said the database he posted is corrupted.

Log files with row counts and field descriptions posted this week by Abdilo showed that one ATC database contained more than 770,000 customer records, and another held over 100,000 records, making the data breach one of Australia's largest.

While Abdilo said he has non-corrupt copies of the database within his possession, he cannot find them.

"I have about 6000 rows that are uncorrupted so far. I am still searching but I doubt I will be able to find the non corrupted one [database]," Abdilo told iTnews.

Abdilo said he mostly conducts his hacking over a Telstra 3G connection to virtual private servers (VPS). The 3G link has a 15 gigabyte a month data cap which Abdilo said gets used up by his family members and as a result, Telstra throttles back the connection to just eight kilobytes a second.

He speculated that the throttled connection was behind the database corruption.

Despite the publicity around the ATC data breach and Abdilo live streaming an intrusion at a United States university yesterday, he said he has not been contacted by the authorities.

"No police have shown up. I've had news agencies contact me, but no feds," he told iTnews.

Abdilo finished school in year 10 at is now at TAFE. He told iTnews he comes from a poor background but hopes to gain IT qualifications like the Offensive Security Certified Professional one day.

He said money, boredom and one-upping other hackers motivate his data intrusions.

His favoured technique is remote structured query language (SQL) command injection, which when used on vulnerable systems will disclose information stored in databases.

Abdilo also said although he was active in the Lizard Squad hacking group in August last year, he is no longer associated with them.