Katy Gallagher, the minister for finance, women and public service of Australia, said on Thursday that the criminals responsible for the Medibank hack are now using women’s personal health information. She added that the Australian government is making every possible effort to address the issue of ‘cyber attacks’.
The comments came a few days after Australia’s largest health insurer Medibank Private Ltd was hit by cyber attack after getting hacked by some criminals. According to a statement from Medibank, some names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, passport numbers of international students, and health claims data have been leaked on a dark web site.
The situation, however, can get worse as the hackers are threatening to leak more data of the people, especially information related to abortions of women.
While reaching out to people and supporting the country’s women, Gallagher shared a post on twitter and said that it is sickening and appalling that the criminals are now weaponising the personal medical information of the Australian women, related to the abortions.
“This is the lowest of the lows. It’s criminal and it’s morally reprehensible”, the minister had said in her Tweet, adding that as a government, we understand the need to address the conditions that have allowed cyber attacks.
The minister for women added that the women have the right to privacy and that their personal health information should be protected by all means.
If the hacker has access to the prime minister’s personal or medical information, it is not immediately evident.
According to Medibank, information on 9.7 million both current and former clients was exposed.
The Australians also reacted to the minister’s comments and expressed their dissatisfaction in the government’s efforts in controlling cyber attacks in the country.
People said, “Surely if these criminals have the ability to hack this information, we have the ability to hunt them down?”, “It’s criminal that Medibank and Optus let their data security lapse b/c they were too cheap to upgrade. In other countries, they’d face huge fines as punishment”.
