serious data breach notification laws

Uniformity of Law: NSW Government opens consultation to consider making Data Breach Reporting mandatory in respect of State Government Agencies

Aug 26 2019

By Cameron Abbott, Warwick Anderson and Max Evans

We have blogged numerous times on the notifiable data breach scheme provided for in Part IIIC of Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) including more recently in relation to its success in assisting the preparedness of the health sector to report and respond to data breaches.

Whilst the NSW Information Privacy Commissioner recommends that public sector agencies notify it and affected individuals where a data breach creates a risk of serious harm, neither NSW privacy laws nor the notifiable data breach scheme require public sector agencies in NSW to provide such notification. There are many reasons for state government agencies to mandatorily report data breaches. Informing citizens when privacy breaches occur provides an opportunity for individual protection against potentially adverse consequences, whilst mandatory data breach reporting would address the current under-reporting of data breaches in NSW, which according to the consultation may be the norm.

Australian organisations hit by thousands of significant cyber incidents

Oct 17 2016

By Cameron Abbott and Rebecca Murray

The Australian Cyber Security Centre’s (ACSC) 2016 Threat Report has revealed that Australian businesses and government have been subject to more than 15,000 significant incidents that they know of. Read the report here. They were the first to admit that given reporting is optional they cannot really determine the full impact.

Due to the current reporting regime, the ACSC has had to rely on data from callouts to CERT Australia (the national first responder to cyber incidents) to assess the extent of the problem in the private sector. CERT Australia responded to 14,804 incidents from the private sector from June 2015 to June 2016. Of those callouts, 418 involved systems of national interest and critical infrastructure. The banking, finance, energy and communications sectors were the most heavily targeted.

While the Government has introduced a bill to mandate serious data breach notification that is set to be passed in the near future (find out more about the bill here), until then, we will continue to go mostly unaware of damaging malicious cyber activity launched against Australian organisations because the private sector largely refuses report these incidents.

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