This "privacy breach" has been going on for over 30 years. These "medical details" are actually just pager messages. Remember pagers? Those pre-mobile-phone radio receivers people used to carry to get messages?
The protocol used by these devices is about 40 years old, and is trivial to decode using nothing more than a $100 radio scanner and computer, or a $20 software defined radio receiver. Although pagers have largely disappeared from public use, it's still not uncommon for places like hospitals to use them as they can be far more reliable than a mobile phone. If I had to guess, I'd say what was being transmitted was not the "medical details" and almost certainly wouldn't have included things like "addresses, and how their cases are being managed" as the story claims, but instead just a summary of an inbound call record being recorded in a case management/ticketing system. Still not good, especially as phone numbers and names were included on some of the messages (at least the ones I managed to find - at least one of the websites hosting them has been taken down, but I was still able to find some in Google's cache) And despite what Nine claimed, logging and decoding such messages is NOT illegal. In most (if not all) states, acting on the information received generally IS illegal, as may well be sharing the information. (Or at least, that was the case 20+ years ago when I used to play with this stuff. Scott On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 8:02 PM Marghanita da Cruz <[email protected]> wrote: > > Sensitive medical details of scores of West Australians have been > > compromised in one of the state's biggest privacy breaches, where > > thousands of state government communications were published on a > > public website... > > https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/unforgivable-the-privacy-breach-that-exposed-sensitive-details-of-wa-s-virus-fight-20200720-p55dsm.html > > -- > Marghanita da Cruz > Telephone: 0414-869202 > Email: [email protected] > Website: http://ramin.com.au > > _______________________________________________ > Link mailing list > [email protected] > http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link > _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
