Displaying items by tag: personal information

Aussies feel trapped by the digital economy with a new online survey finding that the majority of consumers feel they have to share personal data if they want to use digital services - but they don’t trust these organisations to protect that data.

GUEST OPINIION by Mark Feetham, Partner, Thomson Geer:  In Australia there is no legal right to ask for personal information held about you by a third party to be deleted. While that may not seem too consequential given the willingness with which we hand over our personal information to lead our digitally connected lives (for example through use of social media services), there are circumstances when it can be life defining.

New South Wales residents were the most financially impacted by scams in July, accounting for 37% of the total amount lost in the month.

Australia’s two largest telcos - Telstra and Optus - along with Aldi’s Medion Mobile, have been warned by the telecommunications industry regulator ACMA for failing to adequately verify people’s identities prior to transferring their mobile phone numbers from other telcos.

Palo Alto's regional chief security officer for Asia Pacific, vice-president Sean Duca, has warned that cyber-attackers are devising ways to use QR codes to steal personal information.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner was notified of 539 data breaches during the July-December 2020 period, an increase of 5% on the figure of 512 reported during the previous three months.

American cloud software firm Blackbaud has back-flipped on a statement it made after a ransomware attack, saying on Wednesday that the attackers had actually managed to gain access to customer data.

The personal information of nearly 20,000 students at the University of Tasmania has been exposed due to misconfiguration of a Microsoft SharePoint site, the university says.

National Broadband Network operator NBN Co has launched a community education campaign focusing on the threat of scams and warning that scammers are increasing their focus to “deceive Australians”, with new and variations of common NBN themed scams emerging in recent months.

Genuine information about a vast number of people is available on the dark Web for very low prices, the firm PrivacyAffairs says, adding that given this availability it was easy to fake the identity of many individuals.

Australians under 25 years of age lost over $5 million to scams in 2019, with around 12,000 reports about losses by these young Aussies made to Scamwatch in 2019 - an increase of 11% over 2018.

Personal information of Facebook users in Australia was disclosed to the This Is Your Digital Life app for a different purpose to that which it was collected, a breach of the Privacy Act 1988, the Australian Information Commissioner has alleged in a case filed against the social media giant in the Australian Federal Court.

The Australian Department of Defence has played down a report by the ABC claiming that private details of defence force members could have been compromised in a breach of what it described as "a highly sensitive military database".

The personal information of about 13,000 customers of the National Australia Bank was uploaded to the servers of two data service firms by mistake, the bank says.

The primary concern for businesses after the Australian data breach law takes effect on 22 February will be information security, as without that in place, it will not be possible to protect personal information, an expert in cyber security and law says.

Australians love the ebay-owned Gumtree site, which lets anyone buy or sell products online, but there’s been a hack with some personal info accessed.