Hundreds of parents hit by credit card hack at Lilydale school
Hackers have gained access to the credit card details of about 400 parents whose children attend a Catholic school in Melbourne’s outer east.
Mount Lilydale Mercy College principal Philip Morison said the secondary school, which has about 1500 students, first became aware of the incident on January 11.
Parents have been notified about a data breach at Mount Lilydale Mercy College.Credit:Age
Details potentially accessed by the hackers included credit card numbers, but not CCV details, and the school said it was working to mitigate any future risks.
The incident comes after unrelated data breaches at educational institutions late last year, including at the independent Kilvington Grammar School in Ormond and PNORS Technology Group, which holds various contracts with the education department.
Morison said the school has engaged specialist incident response experts, including cybersecurity analysts and forensic IT investigators.
“The protection of data and personal information is of paramount importance to us at Mount Lilydale Mercy College and, on behalf of the College, I wholeheartedly apologise that this has happened,” he said.
“I want to reassure our College and the wider community that we are committed to a best-practice approach in dealing with this kind of incident.”
The school is investigating the hack and is in the process of reporting the incident to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, Australian Cyber Security Centre, the Australian Taxation Office and the Australian Federal Police.
“While I am told that even the most secure IT environments can potentially be hacked by
something as innocent as one person clicking on a link in a phishing email, we will take
learnings from the ongoing investigation and if there are ways to tighten our cybersecurity
practices, we won’t hesitate to make changes,” Morison said.
Parents have been notified of a data breach at Mount Lilydale Mercy College.Credit:Getty
In an unrelated incident, Kilvington Grammar School notified parents of a data breach late last year, in which some personal information of former and current students was accessed including dates of birth, addresses, email addresses, Medicare numbers and health information.
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