University of Western Australia Student Details Exposed in Data Breach

University of Western Australia Student Details Exposed in Data Breach

The University of Western Australia (UWA) has confirmed falling victim to a data breach, with the personal information of current and past students accessed.

In a statement to Gizmodo Australia, UWA confirmed reports that it was a victim of a “data security breach”.

A spokesperson said UWA had detected unauthorised login activity to Callista, the Student Information Management System used by the university.

“The breach was limited to personal data belonging to students and alumni,” they said.

“While there is no evidence that any data has been used, records in Callista include names, images, student ID and image, date of birth and contact details as well as course details and grades.”

The UWA spokesperson said no credit card details, tax file numbers, bank information or medical records were included in the information that has been accessed in the data breach. But it’s unknown how many people the breach is affecting.

The incident, first brought to our attention by iTnews, is being treated seriously by the uni, the UWA spokesperson said. They also said the data breach has been reported to the Western Australian Police for investigation.

“The university sincerely apologises to those impacted by this incident and wants to assure the UWA community that it is conducting a thorough investigation to prevent a similar incident from occurring again,” the spokesperson added.

The University of Western Australia is the second university to fall victim to an attack recently, with Deakin University last month confirming the personal information of 46,980 current and past students was leaked into the wild as a result of a data breach.

According to Deakin, the information was also accessed via software the uni uses. A staff member’s username and password was ‘hacked’ and used by an unauthorised person to access information held by a third-party provider on 10 July 2022.

As iTnews points out, Callista is used by numerous education institutions across Australia, including Monash University and Edith Cowan University.

We’ll update this article if we learn more.


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