Australian Red Cross Blood Service apologizes for data breach

The Australian Red Cross Blood Service has apologized for the recently-detected massive data breach, in which unknown hackers slipped away with personal details of as many as 550,000 blood donors.

The data breach, which is said to be one of the country’s largest ever breaches, was discovered on Tuesday this week, when an online service that offers hacked websites was contacted by a concerned user who had stumbled on the trove of private data.

Australian Red Cross CEO Shelly Park said, “We are incredibly sorry to our donors. We are deeply disappointed this could happen. We take full responsibility and I assure the public we are doing everything in our power to not only right this but to prevent it from happening again.”

Publicly accessible folder included 1,286,366 records, containing personal information including names, addresses, contact information, blood types as well as donation history.

The most worrying was a file containing ‘donor eligibility answers,’ where would-be blood donors answered various questions to validate that they should be allowed to donate blood.

However, Ms. Park played down the risk of any future repercussions to donors. She claimed that IDCARE, an identity & cyber support service, estimated that the breach is of low risk for any misuse in the future.