The personal details of the world's leading political figures were leaked to the organisers of a soccer tournament late last year, in a major data breach caused by an email autofill error.

The breach was caused by a staff member at Australia's Department of Immigration. Details about the leak are just emerging, however, thanks to internal emails. With mandatory data retention already facing opposition from legal experts, media groups, civil liberties advocates and the Australian public, this latest breach has the potential to raise further privacy concerns and questions about the security of data storage in Australia.

Several users of Apple devices in Australia have reported that their gadgets have been "hijacked" - with a message demanding money. Experts believed the hack had targeted users by exploiting the Find my iPhone feature.

A message appeared on some targeted phones asking for "$100 USD/EUR" to be sent to a PayPal account. Networks advised affected users to contact Apple, which denied its cloud storage service had been breached. "Apple takes security very seriously and iCloud was not compromised during this incident. Impacted users should change their Apple ID password as soon as possible and avoid using the same user name and password for multiple services," the firm said.

In 2008 Australian intelligence agencies offered to share the confidential information about Australians with the U.S. It was reported by the Australian edition of The Guardian newspaper, referring to the new documents submitted by Edward Snowden.

According to the newspaper, it is a previously unknown cooperation page of the five countries intelligence that makes up the so-called Group of Five Eyes (“Five Eyes”). Besides the U.S. and Australia, it includes Canada, United Kingdom and New Zealand. As it was previously reported, the purpose of the contract of Five Eyes is not only spying on terrorists, its main task is to collect political, diplomatic and economic information.