Authorities have traced the Origin Energy cyber hack that exposed the personal data of close to a million Australians to a Manila call centre.<\/p>\n
Origin customers told the ABC they feared their personal data had been compromised and expressed frustration that the company had not provided sufficient details of the nature of the incident.<\/p>\n
The investigation has linked a former Accenture employee in Manila, in the Philippines, to last month’s security breach<\/a>.<\/p>\n Accenture runs offshore call centres<\/p>\n Accenture, which has an office in Manila, works with Origin to run its call centres.<\/p>\n The individual, according to a Nine report, wanted to extort the energy provider for money in exchange for the return of the information.<\/p>\n When contacted by ABC News, a spokesperson for Accenture said, “It is not appropriate for us to comment on Origin’s data security incident, which we understand remains under active investigation.”<\/p>\n Origin Energy also declined to comment, saying the security breach was the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation.<\/p>\n Last month The Australian reported<\/a> that a hacker had sent it a sample of 50 customer records containing names, addresses, emails, dates of birth, phone numbers and billing histories.<\/p>\n It is understood that Origin Energy then alerted authorities to a potential data breach.<\/p>\n Origin later told The Business<\/a> it believed the information of approximately 900,000 current and former customers was accessed<\/a>.<\/p>\n Loading…<\/p>\n It was the latest such incident involving a major company in Australia. Qantas suffered a major hack in 2025 and Optus and Medibank experienced mass breaches in 2022.<\/p>\n The energy provider confirmed it became aware of a potential security threat in early July but initially did not believe it credible.<\/p>\n Origin has urged customers to be vigilant to scams and said specialist identity and cyber support services were available to affected customers.<\/p>\n Investigation continues, says AFP<\/p>\n “We have now completed the initial phase of our review into Origin’s customer data security incident,” Origin chief executive Frank Calabria said in July.<\/p>\n “To our customers, I am sorry. We don’t take for granted the trust customers place in Origin and our safeguarding of their information.”<\/p>\n An Australian Federal Police (AFP) spokesperson told the ABC the agency was “working closely with Origin Energy and relevant partners following a reported cyber incident”.<\/p>\n “AFP investigators are focused on gathering evidence, identifying those responsible, and disrupting any associated criminal activity,” the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n “Origin Energy has been cooperative and transparent in its engagement with investigators and continues to provide assistance to the ongoing investigation.”<\/p>\n Editor’s note 18\/08\/2026: A previous version of this story contained information from an Accenture spokesperson that the company now disputes. The story has been updated to reflect this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Authorities have traced the Origin Energy cyber hack that exposed the personal data of close to a million…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":828277,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[16626,429652,29623,64,63,29622,99,401610,137830,429654,429653,429650,429651],"class_list":["post-859544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-accenture","tag-accenture-call-centres","tag-afp","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-federal-police","tag-business","tag-frank-calabria","tag-origin-energy","tag-origin-energy-ceo","tag-origin-energy-customer-data","tag-origin-energy-data-breach","tag-origin-energy-hack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=859544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/828277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=859544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=859544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=859544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}