Data Breach Hits Nearly 40% of the Entire Population of Australia

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner released some pretty stark statistics. One recently disclosed data breach hit 10 million Australian’s.

When you flip a coin, it either comes up heads or tails. What if heads means your information is compromised? That’s statistically close to what Australian’s are going through right now. According to recently disclosed data released by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), one data breach hit 10 million Australian’s. In a country with the population of 25.4 million people, that is a particularly significant number.

According to ZDNet, the source of the breach hasn’t been disclosed. From the report:

The latest quarterly data breach report from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has revealed over 10 million individuals had their information compromised in one single incident. The current population of Australia is around 25.4 million.

The breach was disclosed to the OAIC under the Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme between January 1, 2019, and March 31, 2019 and reported in its Quarterly Statistics Report [PDF].

While the report did not detail the origin of the breach that affected over 10 million individuals, it did show that the most number of affected individuals from a single finance-related breach was less than 500,000 and the health sector’s three heaviest impacting breaches affected less than 5,000 individuals each.

It’s unclear whether citizens affected by the breach have been notified. So, it’s difficult to ascertain whether proper steps to help mitigate the damage have been taken from this standpoint.

Still, it must be a rather unnerving statistic for Australian’s to see published. Is there a reason to be concerned about the security of their information? Should Australian’s be worried that their information is just randomly floating around the dark web at this point? With so little information, the imagination is only left to fill the void where facts should be. Not something you want in a country, really.

Certainly a scary Monday for the country, that’s for sure.

Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.