University of Sydney Suffers Third-Party Data Breach

In the last week of August, University of Sydney disclosed a data breach incident, impacting the recent international students and applicants. The attack is said to have occurred at one of its third-party service providers.

Established in 1850, the University is among the top 20 educational institutes in Australia with 74,000 students and 8,100 academic and operations staff.

According to the published notification, only a limited number of international students that had either applied or enrolled to the University have had their personal information exposed. None of the domestic students, staff, alumni, or donors were impacted, revealed the preliminary investigation.

“The issue was isolated to a single platform and had no impact on other university systems. There is currently no evidence that any personal information has been misused. We are working to contact impacted students and applicants and will continue to monitor our systems,’’ it added.

Details about either the attack, supply chain vendor, or threat actors were not revealed in this notice. Neither was any information revealed about the number of applicants impacted nor details about the compromised information. However, the University announced that it had taken the necessary measures to mitigate the attack and secure its systems.

It had informed the relevant cybersecurity authorities and notified the New South Wales privacy commissioner. Additionally, it advised the affected individuals to reach out to the University and refer to its list of cybersecurity best practices, available on the University webpage, for students.

Students can also email to ict.support@sydney.edu.au for any questions or report any suspicious activity, like phishing or identity theft.

The recent months have witnessed an increase in cyberattacks on higher educational institutions across the world. The previous two months saw an attack on the University of Michigan and Manchester.  In both the incidents, either there was a disruption in operations or extraction of data by threat actors.