TechnologyOne halts ASX trading after back-office systems breached

TechnologyOne, the Brisbane-based enterprise software company, told the Australian Securities Exchange on May 10, 2023 that an unauthorized third party had illegally accessed its internal Microsoft 365 back-office system. The company requested a trading halt, initially set to run until May 12 or until it made a further announcement.

Chief executive Edward Chung said the company had acted with urgency, had initiated its cyber response strategy and had reported the matter to the relevant authorities. He apologised to anyone affected for the concern the incident might cause.

TechnologyOne said its customer-facing SaaS platform is not connected to the affected Microsoft 365 system and had therefore not been impacted. It would not say whether customer or employee data had been accessed in the back-office intrusion, and declined to answer further questions while its investigation continued. The company serves more than 1,300 organisations across government, education, health and financial services in Australia and New Zealand.

No ransomware group claimed the incident. Threat analyst Brett Callow told TechCrunch that the most likely explanations were either a ransomware attack or systems being taken offline pre-emptively after an intrusion was detected, but neither was confirmed.