A NSW Treasury employee has been charged after allegedly accessing and illegally downloading more than 5600 sensitive government documents.
Police charged the 45-year-old man with accessing or modifying restricted data held on a computer following a raid Monday afternoon on a home in Homebush West where police seized electronic devices, including a hard drive.
In a statement, officers said the allegedly stolen data had been located and secured and that there was no external compromise to the agency’s system.
The alleged breach has been declared a “significant cyber incident” by the NSW government, with the NSW Chief Cyber Security Officer is currently coordinating a whole-of-agency response after the matter being reported to police on Sunday.
Addressing the media, NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey said the alleged breach had been detected via internal security monitoring which detected alleged “movement of a large cache of documents” containing confidential commercial and financial information an external server between April 10-14.
The matter was then “effectively escalated” on Friday, April 17.
“It is fair to say multiple government departments, multiple government projects, are affected,” he said.
“Whether that includes third party information, it’s something that, of course, we are working through as we speak.”
Mr Mookhey said the person had been an employee of NSW Treasury for about three years, and had worked for Treasury’s commercial team.
They were not a senior executive service member and were “effectively a grade employee”, Mr Mookhey said.
“The Treasury commercial team is involved in, for want of a better term, a lot of the government’s commercial relationships,” he said.
“They also are involved in a variety of … significant government transactions or negotiations with the private sector, and they are involved in government procurement.”
Mr Mookhey said the employee had been subject to all routine vetting and “no issues were indicated at the time”.
“I’m not going to go into the particular person’s biography … but, a person is working in Treasury has generally got a finance, economics or policy background, and this person’s background is consistent with that,” he said.
The chaged man was granted bail to appear before Downing Centre Local Court on June 3.
