Australian Media Privacy Breach, 02 February 2023

Guardian Australia staff details compromised in cyberattack

Personal data of the 140 staff had been affected

Source: Guardian Australia staff details compromised in cyberattack | WA today

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Personal information including addresses and salary information on 140 current and former Australian staff of multinational media outlet The Guardian may have been accessed by hackers in the crippling cyberattack that hit the company late last year.

On Thursday The Guardian’s Australian managing director Dan Stinton and editor Lenore Taylor emailed local staff to say 140 people employed between February 2017 and May 2019 had their details affected. Tax file numbers, bank account details, superannuation information, salaries and addresses were among the staff details potentially compromised.

Stinton and Taylor told staff in an email seen by this masthead that key Guardian servers were corrupted in the hack, preventing access to information that showed what the hackers had accessed until they were rebuilt.

A spokeswoman for the publication said extensive investigations had uncovered that the personal data of the 140 staff had been affected and added that the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, which reviews data breaches, had been notified of the issue. “A credit monitoring service is in place for all Guardian Australia staff, even though we have seen no evidence that personal data has been exposed online,” the spokeswoman said. “We continue to monitor for this.”