Aquinas College – cyber security incident update - 22 November 2023
Following our last update on the cyber security incident, we can confirm that the College has completed its review of the impacted data and notified potentially affected individuals deemed to be at risk.
If you have received a notification from the College, please review the information contained within it and contact us if you have any further questions.
Our review of the data also identified contact information for some members of our College community. As a precautionary measure, we have outlined some steps you may wish to take to help improve your online safety and protect your information on the following link:
Steps can you take to protect your information online
Aquinas College takes cyber security and the protection of personal information very seriously. We wish to again apologise for any concern this incident has caused and thank our College community for its ongoing understanding and support as we worked to respond to this incident.
Any further queries about this incident should be directed to dataenquiry@bne.catholic.edu.au.
Update: 9 October 2023
We are providing an update on the cyber security incident experienced by Aquinas College.
As you know, after discovery of the incident, we engaged leading external cyber security experts to help us secure our systems and investigate the incident.
As part of this investigation, the College and Brisbane Catholic Education have become aware that a set of data was copied from a portion of the College's IT environment and some of this data has recently been disclosed on the dark web, a section of the internet not readily accessible by the public.
The College and Brisbane Catholic Education are currently in the process of reviewing the dataset. If sensitive information is identified to be in the dataset, we will notify at risk individuals as quickly as possible. If any further data disclosure occurs, we will again move swiftly to review the data and directly contact anyone assessed to be at risk.
Our broader investigation into the incident and the extent of information accessed is ongoing. As previously advised, the College has notified the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Queensland Police about the incident.
We again apologise for any inconvenience or concern that the incident has caused and thank you for your ongoing support and patience.
We will continue to update our website with regular updates on the status of our investigation.
3 October 2023
Aquinas College has been impacted by a cybersecurity incident where an unknown third party gained unauthorised access to a portion of its IT environment.
After discovering the incident, Aquinas College in consultation with Brisbane Catholic Education took immediate steps to secure the College's IT environment by taking impacted systems offline and engaging leading external cyber security experts to carry out an investigation into the incident.
The investigation into the incident and the extent of data accessed is ongoing.
All the circumstances and evidence indicate that only Aquinas College's IT environment has been impacted by this incident. If this position changes, we will let you know.
Separately, we have notified the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the Australian Cyber Security Centre, and Queensland Police about the incident. We will continue to keep these agencies updated as our investigation progresses.
Aquinas College and Brisbane Catholic Education takes cyber security and the protection of our data very seriously. We are committed to keeping the College community updated as we work to respond to the incident. Additional protections and checks have also been put in place to further secure the IT environment and to immediately detect any future unusual activity.
We recommend all our College community remain vigilant against the potential risk of receiving phishing or other scam communications from any parties claiming to be from Aquinas College. Please do not respond to any email, telephone or social media communications that seem suspicious.
We apologise for any inconvenience or concern this has caused. We thank you for your support and patience while we work to resolve this matter as quickly as possible.
We will continue to update our website with regular updates on the status of our investigation.
If you have any questions or would like support, please contact dataenquiry@bne.catholic.edu.au.