What happened
In mid-2020 records from ProctorU, a US-based online exam-proctoring service, were published on a hacker forum [proctoru-bc]. Have I Been Pwned indexed about 444,000 email addresses from the leaked data — a global total, not a count of Australian students — and BleepingComputer and HIBP report the passwords as hashed (bcrypt) [proctoru-hibp], [proctoru-bc]. Honi Soit reported around 440,000 records and described the passwords as unencrypted, so reporting on the password format conflicts [honisoit-proctoru]. ProctorU confirmed a breach of records from 2014 [proctoru-bc].
The records included email addresses from several Australian universities. Some universities (including UNSW, UQ, Adelaide, UWA and JCU) said they were not affected or did not use ProctorU, and the University of Sydney said only users registered on or before 2014 were affected [proctoru-itnews].
Timeline
- 2020-07 — ProctorU data published on a hacker forum (from 21 July 2020) [proctoru-bc].
- 2020-08 — ProctorU confirms the breach; Australian universities investigate [proctoru-bc], [proctoru-itnews].
Current status
Disclosed. The ~444,000 figure is an HIBP count of addresses in the leaked data, not a company-confirmed or Australia-specific count [proctoru-hibp]. The date of the underlying intrusion has not been established.
Why it matters
A COVID-era case: rushed adoption of remote-exam software concentrated student data with an overseas provider, and that data then leaked.