For literally hundreds of years now, first in colonial, then in dominion and later in federation periods, Australia has relied on a 'paper and ink' processes to decide major political votes by its eligible citizens.
By and large this system has produced reliable results with regards to the people's will.
This is evidence of just the
latest red flag that Australian governments have ignored ……
The Mercury online, 30 June 2018:
The personal information
of about 4000 Tasmanian voters has been leaked after a data breach on a
third-party website linked to express votes, the state’s Electoral Commission
has revealed.
Tasmanian Electoral
Commissioner Andrew Hawkey said hackers had access to the names, dates of
birth, emails and postal addresses of those who applied for an express vote at
the recent state and Legislative Council elections.
“Early today, the
Tasmanian Electoral Commission was informed by the Barcelona-based company
Typeform, that an unknown third party had gained access to one of their servers
and downloaded certain information,” he said.
“Typeform online forms
have been used on the TEC website since 2015 for some of its election services.
The breach involved an unknown attacker downloading a backup file.
“Typeform’s full
investigation of the breach identified that data collected through five forms
on the TEC website had been stolen.”
The breach was
identified by Typeform on June 27 and shut down within half an hour of
detection, Mr Hawkey said.
“The Electoral
Commission will be contacting electors that used these services in the coming
days to inform them of the breach,” Mr Hawkey said.
“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 breach has no connection to the national or
state electoral roll.”
Mr Hawkey said some of
the stolen information had previously been made public, such as candidate
statements for local government by-elections.
Typeform said it had
responded immediately and had fixed the source of the breach to prevent further
hacks.
“We have since been
performing a full forensic investigation of the incident to be certain that
this cannot happen again,” a statement on the Typeform website read.
“The results that were
accessed are from a partial backup dated May 3, 2018. Results collected since
May 3 are therefore safe and not compromised.’
Typeform reportedly
provides services for some pretty big names, including Apple, Uber, Airbnb and
Forbes.
The hack comes after up
to 120,000 Tasmanian job seekers may have had their personal information
compromised following a data breach reported by human resources company PageUp
in early June.
That site was linked to
the Tasmanian Government and the University of Tasmania.
The State Government is
still waiting for a further response from PageUp but it is believed the breach
was limited to names, addresses, emails and phone numbers.
