New data breach rules in effect from 22 February 2018 place an onus on business to protect and notify individuals whose personal information is involved in a data breach that is likely to result in ‘serious harm’.
In October last year, almost 50,000 employee records from Australian Government agencies, banks and a utility were exposed and compromised because of a misconfigured cloud based ‘Amazon S3 bucket’. AMP was reportedly one of the worst affected with 25,000 leaked employee records. ITNews reports that the data breach was discovered by a Polish researcher who conducted a search for
Amazon S3 buckets set to open, with “dev”, “stage”, or “prod” in the domain name. One contractor appears to be behind the breach.
In October 2016, the details of over half a million Red Cross blood donors were inadvertently exposed after a website contractor created an insecure data backup.