The names, addresses and date of birth of around 4000 voters has been compromised after a hacker stole information from a company used by the Tasmanian Electoral Commission.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The data was stolen after a hacker accessed a backup file stored by Barcelona-based survey platform Typeform.
The TEC has used Typeform since 2015 and was notified of the data breach on Saturday.
“Typeform’s full investigation of the breach identified that data collected through five forms on the TEC website had been stolen,” the TEC said in a statement.
“Whilst some of the stolen elector data captured in some of these forms has already been made public, such as candidate statements for a local government by-election, it is believed that the breach also captured name, address, email and date of birth information provided by electors when applying for an express vote at the recent State and Legislative Council elections.”
The TEC will contact electors affected by the breach and launch a full cyber security audit on Monday.
“The Electoral Commission apologises for the breach and will re-evaluate its collection procedures and internal security elements around its storage of electoral information for future events,” the TEC said.
The TEC said the data breach had no impact on election results.
THE DATA BREACH
Typeform detected the data breach at 2pm on June 27.
The company said it fixed the cause of the breach within 30 minutes of detection.
“We have since been performing a full forensic investigation of the incident to be certain that this cannot happen again. The risk of re-occurrence is now deemed low enough to send out this communication,” Typeform said in a statement.
Typeform said it had already initiated a comprehensive review of its security system and fixed the security vulnerability.
“As a data collection company, maintaining the security and privacy of our customers’ data is our top priority. We will continue to take significant measures to prevent this type of situation from happening in the future, including a full-scale review of our security,” Typeform said.
Lachlan Bennett
Lachlan Bennett is a journalist based in Burnie with an interest in politics, primary industries, transportation, tourism and the West Coast.
Lachlan Bennett is a journalist based in Burnie with an interest in politics, primary industries, transportation, tourism and the West Coast.
