Accidentally G20 world leaders passport and visa personal details revealed to the organizers of the Asian Cup in Australia before the G20 summit in Brisbane in November 2014.The United States president, Barack Obama, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, and the British prime minister, David Cameron, were among those who attended the Brisbane summit in November and whose details were exposed.
According to the Guardian, the Australian privacy commissioner was contacted by the director of the visa services division of Australia’s Department of Immigration and Border Protection to inform them of the data breach on 7 November 2014 and seek urgent advice.
The personal information which has been breached is the name, date of birth, title, position, nationality, passport number, visa grant number and visa subclass held relating to 31 international leaders attending the G20 Leaders' Summit.
According to the Department report, the unintended recipient of the email immediately advised that the staff member had "sent the email to the wrong person", that it had been deleted and had not been forwarded or copied to a backup system.
The officer wrote that it was “unlikely that the information is in the public domain”, and said the absence of other personal identifiers “limits significantly” the risk of the breach. The unauthorised recipient had deleted the email and “emptied their deleted items folder”.
“The Asian Cup local organising committee do not believe the email to be accessible, recoverable or stored anywhere else in their systems,” the letter said.
The breach was said to be the result of "human error", with the sender forgetting to check the auto-fill function in Microsoft Outlook's email service before hitting send.
"There was nothing systemic or institutional about the breach," continued the email from the government official.
