University of Sydney Data Breach Exposes Student and Staff Personal Information

Did you ever believe your University Personal Information would be protected from theft? The University of Sydney's recent hack confirms this belief was unfounded, with hackers breaching their IT systems and extracting private information on students and staff.

As someone that keeps up with these stories, I do not see them just as numbers. Each number has an associated name, email address, and private information.

So what exactly did the hackers compromise?​

The Hackers gained access to the following databases:

• Student Personal Information
• Employee Personal Information
• Contact Information and Identifying Numbers

Although the University of Sydney acted quickly in responding to and investigating the data breach and to secure its IT systems, some of the Private Information was unfortunately still vulnerable for exposure.

So why does this issue matter?​

The Exploitation of anyone's Personal Information opens the door for Phishing Emails, Identity Theft and/or Online Scams. How many of you have received an email that looked legitimate but turned out to be a Spam email?

The University of Sydney's data breach presents this threat to Students and Employees alike and should be treated with caution by students and employees alike regarding any Emails and Links.

This section contains additional steps that anyone affected by a Data Protection Breach from another organization can take to protect themselves.

If your data were taken by someone else, you should do the following immediately:

• Change your password for the University of Sydney now.
• Use Two-Factor Authentication (if possible).
• Be careful of emails or messages claiming to come from the University that are suspicious in any way.

In summary​

While the University of Sydney works on fixing the problem, it's really important that you keep being careful and take steps to protect your account and personal information, because you can't count on anyone else to do it for you.