Stanford discloses admissions data breach. Australian pubs allegedly use surveillance tech. News Corp’s data breach.

At a glance.

• Stanford University discloses admissions data breach.
• Australian pubs use surveillance tech to up the ante on poker profits.
• News Corp’s data breach worse than initially reported. 

Stanford University discloses admissions data breach. 

Stanford University suffered a data breach after files containing information on admissions to the Economics Ph.D. program were stolen from its website between December 2022 and January 2023. "On January 24, 2023, Stanford was notified that a folder containing the 2022-23 application files for admission to Stanford's Department of Economics' Ph.D. program was available through the department's website because of a misconfiguration of the folder's settings," the university told nearly nine hundred affected individuals last week. Bleeping Computer reports that the compromised data consist of applications and accompanying materials submitted by program hopefuls including names, dates of birth, street addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, race and ethnicity info, citizenship details, and gender. For some individuals, health data were also exposed. It’s worth noting that this is Stanford’s second cyberincident in recent years, as in April 2021 School of Medicine was impacted in the infamous Accellion File Transfer Application data breach. 

Australian pubs allegedly use surveillance tech to up the ante on poker profits. 

In an effort to maximize profits from poker machines, Australian pubs and clubs are deploying surveillance technology and data analytics to track the activities of gambling patrons, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. A recent report found that New South Wales (NSW) gamblers lost $2.1 billion to the machines in the final quarter of 2022, and pub owners have increasingly targeted gamblers with purpose-built gaming rooms, with over 75% of large clubs’ “core operational revenue'' now coming from poker machine losses. The Wesley Mission, a Christian charity group, says that pub and club operators are following in the footsteps of casinos by using sophisticated retail surveillance systems equipped with number plate and player recognition, CCTV, heat mapping, and crowd counting to capitalize on patron data harvesting. “The business model for pubs and clubs is centred on having more people spend more time at poker machines and spending more money on them,” Wesley chief executive Reverend Stu Cameron stated. However, club owners say the data derived from the surveillance tech will only be used to exclude known problem gamblers. A spokesperson for ClubsNSW, the representational body for the NSW club industry, stated that the body “is not aware of any club being in breach of their privacy obligations.”

New Corp’s data breach seems worse than initially reported. 

News Corporation (News Corp) has divulged that attackers responsible for a previously reported breach had access to the American mass media giant’s systems for two years. Notification letters sent to affected employees explain that the breach, initially disclosed last year, actually started back in February 2020. Bleeping Computer reports that the threat actors had access to an email and document storage system used by several News Corp businesses, compromising personal and health information from a number of the conglomerate’s publications (including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and its UK news operations). When the breach was first reported, cybersecurity firm Mandiant’s VP of incident response David Wong stated, “Mandiant assesses that those behind this activity have a China nexus, and we believe they are likely involved in espionage activities to collect intelligence to benefit China's interests."