Thousands of personal and work email addresses leaked in major myDarwin data breach

THE email addresses of thousands of Territorians have been “accidentally” leaked by the City of Darwin ahead of the next round of the myDarwin voucher scheme, in a major data breach.

The email addresses of thousands of Territorians have been “accidentally” leaked by the City of Darwin ahead of the next round of the myDarwin voucher scheme.

THE email addresses of thousands of Territorians have been “accidentally” leaked by the City of Darwin ahead of the next round of the myDarwin voucher scheme, in a major data breach.

This morning subscribers to the myDarwin program were sent an email informing users when the next round of discounts would begin, however copied into the announcement were the email addresses of thousands of Territorians.

In two emails seen by The NT News, there were 442 addresses included, covering people whose email addresses began with the letters “jo” to “he”.

It is understood several thousand email addresseses were leaked, out of the almost 30,000 people who are subscribed to the myDarwin scheme.

Not all subscribers received an email with the addresses.

A second email was sent to subscribers this afternoon apologising for the error.

“We were so eager to let you know that another round of myDarwin was about to go live, that we accidentally disclosed subscribers’ email addresses to others in that alphabetical group,” the email read read.

“We sincerely apologise for our mistake!

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“We want to assure you that your privacy and personal information is managed in accordance with City of Darwin’s Privacy Policy and our email disclaimer(*) advises that the transmission of our email correspondence is confidential and intended only for use of the subscriber (or addressee).

“We hope that you can forgive us and make the most of myDarwin by spending it in our beloved bricks and mortar businesses across Darwin.

“At City of Darwin, we will continue to focus our efforts on supporting our community and local businesses impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, through the myDarwin initiative!”

A City of Darwin spokeswoman apologised for the error.

“In a team member’s haste to communicate with our loyal subscribers to myDarwin, the subscriber emails weren’t marked as undisclosed,” she said.

“We’ve had a few enquiries from subscribers, and we’ve been able to respond to all of those to allay concerns. We’ve let our myDarwin subscribers know about how we manage their privacy and personal information. It was a mistake and we’ve profusely apologised.”

She said extra protocols had been put in place to ensure the error did not happen again.

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The voucher scheme restarts tomorrow, with the NT Government putting $200,000 back into Darwin’s voucher pool.

About 360 businesses are signed up to the successful scheme.

Darwin Lord Mayor Kon Vatskalis said the money would be split into two $100,000 pools, starting today and next Thursday, to help the money last longer.

The scheme will be extended by the NT Government to the rest of the Territory, with local councils able to access up to $200,000.