Queensland Education Minister, John-Paul Langbroek, has confirmed an international cybersecurity breach involving a third-party provider, Instructure, which delivers the Department’s online learning platform, QLearn, is being investigated.
The Minister said he was briefed this morning on the incident, which potentially impacts thousands of education institutions, including state schools and universities within Queensland, across Australia and overseas.
“Early advice is this will impact more than 200 million people and more than 9,000 institutions worldwide,” the Minister said.
“Early advice is students and staff working or studying at Education Queensland schools since 2020, when the former Government introduced the online system, have been affected.
“Advice at this stage is names, email addresses and school locations have been compromised in the international data breach. No evidence of passwords, dates of birth or financial information being accessed in the data breach.”
He said school principals are in the process of contacting families and teachers to advise them of the breach.
“The Department of Education is providing priority support to families and teachers with known family and domestic violence, or those known to Child Safety. The Department of Education will continue to update Queenslanders as further information is available.”
