By Violet Li
Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) Victoria’s external contact centre was hacked with thousands of customers’ information stolen, including those of Cardinia residents who reported odour pollution in the past several years.
EPA Victoria has been advised by the external service provider of its Contact Centre that data has been illegally removed from its internal systems by an unknown third party.
The stolen information was from October 2021, September 2022, and October 2022. EPA staff and about 2,800 members of the public have had some of their details hacked.
A combination of customers’ names, email addresses, residential addresses and phone numbers were illegally shared.
The environment regulatory advised the impacted public via email on Thursday 11 July.
“We have taken immediate action to rectify this as soon as becoming aware of the incident. We have written to those who have been impacted by this breach to personally inform them of the incident and what we have done to rectify it,” a spokesperson of EPA Victoria said.
“We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may cause our stakeholders, partners, employees and the community.
“We have worked closely with relevant government agencies and specialist security partners to remove the threat from our systems, with all sites purged of unauthorised access, resetting of passwords and other robust security measures.
“The data and privacy of our community, stakeholders, and employees are important to us.”
The spokesperson said EPA had a dedicated security incident response team in place coordinating activities focused on ensuring the privacy of the information they hold was protected and ensuring they could effectively continue to protect the Victorian community and our environment from the harms caused by pollution and waste.
“EPA is continuing to monitor the situation and ensure all data shared with us is secure and confidential,” they said.
A Casey resident, who reported the odour pollution before, said they had received the email last week notifying their data breach.
“I feel that the EPA, a Victorian Government agency, was careless in the handling of our personal information,” they said.
“How long have they known about this?
“The EPA obviously didn’t take effective steps to prevent this data breach.
“I am worried that the data breach may cause me future financial fraud at any time. It also makes me reluctant to report anything to the EPA in the future.”
