Massive Data Breach of 30,000 employees of Victorian Government!!

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The year 2018 saw some major data and security breaches all around the world. The scale of data breaches that had compromised the user’s data in the online world was astounding. Hackers not just hacked social networking platforms; they even challenged some of the biggest government-owned websites, security firms, banks, and mobile apps, etc.

In a recent data breach hackers stolen the work details of nearly 30,000 Victorian government employees. Workers work details like work emails, job description, and work contact numbers are compromised. Affected employees by the breach were told in an email their contact numbers may have also been accessed if they had been entered into the directory.

The breach took place when the Victorian Government directory was accessed and downloaded by an unauthorized person. However, no banking or financial information was affected by the breach. Because of this incident, employees may experience increased phishing, spam, and social engineering attempts via their work email address and phone numbers.

"If you take even small snippets of information and you aggregate them into a dataset, you can then get an image of the entire State Government because you know all the different people, their positions, their phone numbers … and you can figure out where the power center is and who you would target if you were going to try to hack someone's email," Dr. Dreyfus said.

She said the dataset could be valuable to anyone trying to influence government decision making. "Whether that's for commercial reasons about winning a contract or whether you were an international state player who might have an interest — financial or policy-wise — all of these types of people could be advantaged by the information that was actually hacked," she said.

The Premier's Department said it had referred the breach to police, the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner for investigation.

"The Government will ensure any learnings from the investigation are put in place to better protect against breaches like this in the future," a spokesperson for the department said in a statement.