Incident: Thieves steal laptops with 30 years of data from University of Western Australia | iTnews
Australian Information Security Incident Reported: July 28 2019
Thieves steal laptops with 30 years of data from University of Western Australia
Reported in: iTnews
Thieves broke into the University of Western Australia and stole an undisclosed number of laptops containing “fragmented” student data stretching back 30 years.
Vice-Chancellor Professor Dawn Freshwater said in an email to students that the laptops contained “fragmented data relating predominantly to people who applied to study at UWA between 1988 and January 2018” stored locally on the machines. “The bulk of this data relates to Australian citizens or residents and includes tax file numbers (TFN) and student identification numbers, and in these cases while some names and contact information are spread across the laptops, they are not directly linked to the TFNs or student IDs,” she said.
International students that applied to study at UWA “between September 2014 and December 2018” had a wider variety of information stored on the stolen machines, included personal details, passport numbers, and Visa status and numbers.
