The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner will also be restored to a three-commissioner structure after defunding by Coalition

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The federal government will appoint a dedicated privacy commissioner to deal with the increasing threat of data breaches, the attorney general has announced.

Mark Dreyfus revealed late on Tuesday evening that the Albanese government would also restore the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) to a three-commissioner structure, saying the appointments were necessary to deal with “the growing threats to data security and the increasing volume and complexity of privacy issues”.

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Cyberattack resulted in hacking of 4TB of data including IDs, finance reports, accounting data, client documents and credit card details

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The Australian commercial law firm HWL Ebsworth has fallen victim to a ransomware attack, with Russian-linked hackers claiming to have obtained client information and employee data.

Late last week, the ALPHV/Blackcat ransomware group posted on its website that 4TB of company data had been hacked, including employee CVs, IDs, financial reports, accounting data, client documentation, credit card information, and a complete network map.

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Investment fraud amounts for biggest share at $1.5bn, followed by remote access and payment redirection rorts

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Australians lost a record amount of more than $3.1bn to scams in 2022, up from the $2bn lost in 2021, a new report from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has revealed.

The Targeting Scams report, which compiles data from Scamwatch, ReportCyber, major banks and money remitters, was based on an analysis of more than 500,000 reports.

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Exclusive: Experts say sensitive information could potentially have been harvested and used for targeted election interference

The voting intentions of millions of Britons in local authority wards across the country could have been at risk of misuse as a result of a glitch in the Labour party’s main phone-banking system, the Guardian understands.

Experts had warned that the sensitive data could potentially have been harvested via an automated programme and used for targeted election interference by campaign groups or even hostile states.

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Regulator says Carlos Abarca ‘failed to take reasonable steps’ to ensure outsourcing firm was ready to migrate accounts en masse

UK regulators have imposed an £81,000 fine on a former TSB information officer over the bank’s IT meltdown in 2018 that left millions of customers locked out of their accounts.

The Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) said Carlos Abarca, who was TSB’s chief information officer at the time of the meltdown, “failed to take reasonable steps” to ensure that an outsourcing firm owned by TSB’s parent company was ready to carry out the IT migration of customers en masse.

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With government concerns over national security growing, Beijing’s influence over platforms such as WeChat and Shein could come under scrutiny

As TikTok, the world’s most popular app, comes under increasing scrutiny in response to data privacy and security concerns, lawmakers in the west may soon set their sights on other Chinese platforms that have gone global.

TikTok was built by ByteDance as a foreign version of its popular domestic video-sharing platform, Douyin. But it is far from being ByteDance’s only overseas moneymaker. The Chinese company owns dozens of apps that are available overseas, many of them English-language versions of Chinese offerings.

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Alluring and useful they may be, but the AI interfaces’ potential as gateways for fraud and intrusive data gathering is huge – and is only set to grow

Concerns about the growing abilities of chatbots trained on large language models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing Chat, are making headlines. Experts warn of their ability to spread misinformation on a monumental scale, as well as the existential risk their development may pose to humanity. As if this isn’t worrying enough, a third area of concern has opened up – illustrated by Italy’s recent ban of ChatGPT on privacy grounds.

The Italian data regulator has voiced concerns over the model used by ChatGPT owner OpenAI and announced it would investigate whether the firm had broken strict European data protection laws.

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Operation led by FBI and Dutch police with involvement of UK National Crime Agency takes Genesis Market offline

A criminal online marketplace selling millions of stolen identities for as little as 56p has been taken down in an international crackdown.

The sting, led by the FBI and Dutch police with the involvement of law enforcement agencies across 18 countries, including the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), took Genesis Market offline on Tuesday evening.

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Documents leaked from Vulkan cybersecurity firm also raise questions about role of IT engineers behind information-control project

A consortium of media outlets have published a bombshell investigation about Russia’s cyber-capabilities, based on a rare leak of documents. The files come from NTC Vulkan, a cybersecurity firm in Moscow that doubles as a contractor to Russian military and intelligence agencies.

They reveal how, for years, a group of top Russian IT engineers have been hired to work with Russian military intelligence and a research facility of the FSB, Vladimir Putin’s domestic spy agency. This might seem an unusual mix, and would have been unimaginable before the end of the cold war.

Andrei Soldatov is the author of The Compatriots: The Russian Exiles Who Fought Against the Kremlin

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• Documents leaked by whistleblower angry over Ukraine war

• Private Moscow consultancy bolstering Russian cyberwarfare

• Tools support hacking operations and attacks on infrastructure

• Documents linked to notorious Russian hacking group Sandworm

• Russian program aims to control internet and spread disinformation

The inconspicuous office is in Moscow’s north-eastern suburbs. A sign reads: “Business centre”. Nearby are modern residential blocks and a rambling old cemetery, home to ivy-covered war memorials. The area is where Peter the Great once trained his mighty army.

Inside the six-storey building, a new generation is helping Russian military operations. Its weapons are more advanced than those of Peter the Great’s era: not pikes and halberds, but hacking and disinformation tools.

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