The Department of Social Services has
In letters sent in early November the department alerted the employees to “a data compromise relating to staff profiles within the department’s credit card management system prior to 2016”.
Compromised data includes credit card information, employees’ names, user names, work phone numbers, work emails, system passwords, Australian government services number, public service classification and organisation unit.
The department failed to warn staff how long the data was exposed for but a DSS spokesman told Guardian Australia that the contractor, Business Information Services, had advised that the data was open from June 2016 until October 2017. The data related to the period 2004 to 2015.
The letters from the DSS chief financial officer, Scott Dilley, blame “the actions of the department’s third-party provider” and say the compromise “is not a result of any of the department’s internal systems”.
