Tom Williams reports:
An external software developer engaged by an Australian government agency accidentally made a collection of private documents available on the public internet earlier this year, according to the nation’s Privacy Commissioner, Carly Kind.
The commissioner revealed the data breach on Tuesday and confirmed the incident was reported to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) in the period between January and June 2025.
The breach was classified as a Notifiable Data Breach due to its potential to cause serious harm to Australians.
A third-party software developer had been engaged to work on the federal government agency’s website, said Kind, who did not state which agency or which external provider were involved.
“The software developer ran a script on the website, without authorisation from the agency, which caused documents designated as ‘private’ to become publicly available online and on search engines,” Kind wrote in a blog post.
Read more at acs Information Age.