ACCORDING to The Sydney Morning Herald, a western Sydney council, Fairfield Council, has obtained an injunction against unknown threat actors in a ransomware incident. The breach occurred in October last year and involved servers containing personal, financial and property information about councillors, ratepayers, residents and staff, with hackers assumed to be located outside Australia.
A ransom note claimed the network had been encrypted and that the attackers had downloaded compromising data, threatening to publish it if the council did not engage “only through a specified chatroom.” The council has joined others in seeking and obtaining injunctions prohibiting publication of stolen data, with interim orders in a 2025 preceding case restraining dissemination and requiring steps to remove the Exfiltrated Dataset from the internet, including dark web locations. The conditions, including protection of the identities of parties involved, were finalised in the March decision.