A very rough year of cyber attacks prompted quick and dramatic legislative action in Australia, and the latest development is the announcement of a new national cybersecurity plan to be funded with A$587 million.
Cyber Incident at DP World Australia Shut Down Port Operations, Backed Up 30,000 Shipping Containers
Large-scale cyber incident on critical infrastructure shut down port operations across Australia over the weekend, prompting a backup of some 30,000 shipping containers that were unable to unload for several days.
Small businesses with under AUD 3 million annual turnover have been exempt from Australia's Privacy Act terms to date, but that has been taken off the table in a new round of reforms that could become law in 2024.
Pizza Hut Australia has sent data breach notifications to 193,000 customers after a third party accessed a database containing personal and transactional information.
Meta is facing a total of $20 million in fines in Australia due to misleading consumers about personal data usage. Facebook Israel and VPN service Onavo Protect promised to keep user data private and safe, but were sharing collected personal information with Meta for use in its targeted advertising systems.
Australia has been experiencing unusually serious problems with data breaches for nearly a year now. HWL Ebsworth, one of the country's most prominent law firms, appears to have had a huge amount of client information stolen by ALPHV/BlackCat.
The Australia TikTok ban follows the same concerns that have prompted actions by its allies; fears that sensitive personal or classified information will find its way from government devices to ByteDance servers in China.
A mid-March data breach at Australian financial service provider Latitude was initially estimated as impacting a little over a quarter of a million of its customers. Latitude now says that 14 million records were exposed, including passport numbers.
Australia’s Latitude Financial Services is investigating a data breach that impacted two third-party service providers, exposing hundreds of thousands of customer records.
Among the 116 proposals in the Privacy Act review are calls for safeguards similar to those provided by the EU's GDPR. Small businesses will likely be upset at seeing previously proposed exemptions wiped away, however.
