Lawyer bank details, contacts exposed in West Australian cyber hack

The Perth legal fraternity has been rocked by a cyber security scandal which has exposed the bank account details and contact information of practitioners.

West Australian lawyer bank details and contacts have been exposed in cyber hack. Picture: iStock

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Western Australia’s legal fraternity has been plunged into chaos and confusion after the bank details and contact information of practitioners was posted to the dark web following a cyber hack on the state’s legal board.

The Legal Practice Board of Western Australia was on Wednesday forced to take out an injunction to prevent the further dissemination of confidential information extracted from its digital data base.

A senior Perth legal source has told The Australian the profession is up in arms over the breach which has possibly effected anyone with a WA practising certificate – including current silks, sitting judges and chief justice Peter Quinlan.

“This has jeopardised the safety of individuals, being judicial officers and lawyers who require privacy from clients and parties,” the source said. “They have not provided enough guidance on this matter.”

Legal Practice Board executive director Libby Fulham on Wednesday night told The Australian the board is “investigating the nature and extent of this incident as a priority, with support from external experts.”

“Our investigation to date has found that a small amount of correspondence was taken from our IT environment and has now been disclosed,” she said.

“This correspondence primarily contains limited contact details and internal operational and resourcing information, as well as bank account information for the board and a small number of third parties, who have been directly notified. All those whose banking details were involved have been directly notified.”

She said the board had obtained an injunction to “prevent any access, dissemination or sharing of any data impacted by this incident”.

However, she confirmed the board became aware of an online post by dark web group Dire Wolf on Tuesday.

Ms Fulham confirmed the board took some systems offline on May 21 when we detected some unusual activity on our network”.

“We emailed lawyers with a WA practising certificate yesterday evening to make them aware of the incident and that we continuing to deliver our key services, such as renewal of practising certificates, with some manual workarounds in place,” she said.

“We do not have any credible evidence at this time to suggest the third party possesses any other board data.”

The source said criminal and family lawyers are worried about their personal details being revealed as most are silent voters and have suppressed details.