The University of Sydney disclosed a data breach in which attackers accessed and downloaded personal information belonging to approximately 27,500 individuals from one of its online code libraries. The compromised system was used for code storage and development and contained historical data files, likely retained from testing and development activities. Exposed information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and employment details of about 10,000 current and 12,500 former staff and affiliates employed in September 2018, along with historical records from 2010–2019 affecting roughly 5,000 alumni and students.

Relevant authorities have been notified, and the university expects the investigatory and remediation effort to continue into early 2026 due to its complexity. Impacted individuals have begun receiving notifications, with the process expected to conclude in January 2026, while the university continues to actively monitor for any signs of data publication or secondary abuse.

This incident highlights a recurring risk across higher education and research environments: limited visibility into development platforms, legacy data repositories, and service dependencies. A next-generation approach to network, service, mobility, and infrastructure monitoring is essential to prevent and contain such exposures. Universities and large institutions must unify network traffic visibility, application and service monitoring, developer platform oversight, infrastructure telemetry, and anomaly detection into a single, real-time situational awareness platform that includes SIEM, TI, NDR, XDR, Network Forensics, DPI, SOAR, IDS, and more, like NIKSUN. By correlating access patterns, data movement, and service behavior across on-prem, cloud, and development environments, organizations can quickly identify unauthorized access, forgotten data stores, and abnormal exfiltration events. Read more about this story on our LinkedIn page