Australia exposed data for over 774,000 migrants

guest · May 3, 2020

Australia exposed data for over 774,000 migrants
You might only need to guess to obtain someone's details
May 3, 2020
https://www.engadget.com/australia-exposes-migrant-data-234523042.html

Carelessness with data is dangerous as a general rule, but it’s particularly damaging when it affects vulnerable groups. The Australian government is facing criticism after its home affairs department left the personal details of over 774,000 existing and would-be migrants exposed online.

As The Guardian observed, the country’s SkillsSelect digital platform made it all too easy to filter down expressions of interest (that is, people intending to migrate) to see sensitive details like age, birth country, marital status, qualifications and the outcome of an application. You could learn a significant amount about someone’s personal life if you had a vague idea of who you were looking for.

The employment department took SkillsSelect offline for “maintenance” soon after The Guardian got in touch, but it’s not clear when the migrant tool might come back. Officials may be in trouble in the meantime, though, as they’re required to notify both the privacy commissioner and victims.
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The Guardian: Home affairs data breach may have exposed personal details of 700,000 migrants

Exclusive: Privacy experts say the breach in the SkillsSelect platform, which affects data going back to 2014, was ‘very serious’

With just two clicks, users of the app can view a range of fields including the applicants’ “ADUserID”, a unique identifier composed of partial name information and numbers.
Teague, privacy academic and chief executive of Thinking Cybersecurity, said the presence of ADUserIDs “looks like a stuff-up”.

“It certainly looks like if you had a hypothesis about who had applied you could guess their UserID,” she said.
“If you can use this to pin down a specific person that you’re thinking about and from that understand what they had entered into certain categories, then that is a way to extract information you might not already have known.”
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Australia exposed data for over 774,000 migrants

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