Tangerine Data Breach

What happened

In February 2024, the Australian Telco Tangerine suffered a data breach that exposed over 200k customer records. Attributed to a legacy customer database, the data included physical and email addresses, names, phone numbers and dates of birth. Whilst the Tangerine login process involves sending a one-time password after entering an email address and phone number, it previously used a traditional password which was also exposed as a bcrypt hash.

Exposed data

Recommended actions

• Change your Tangerine password immediately, and update it anywhere you reused the same password.
• Enable two-factor authentication on the affected account and on your critical services (email, banking).
• Watch for targeted phishing emails referencing Tangerine — attackers weaponise breach data quickly.
• Stay alert for smishing (SMS phishing) and SIM-swap attempts using your phone number.
• Exposed identity data raises identity-theft risk — consider credit monitoring or a credit freeze.