Minimising tax is legal. A new report accuses Microsoft of doing it on a grand scale
Medibank doesn’t know if your data is private after ‘incident’
Australia’s biggest health insurance company Medibank confirmed it is the latest corporate target of a cyberattack, but the insurer is unable to say whether its members’ sensitive health information might have been compromised.
In a statement to the ASX on Thursday, Medibank said it had detected “unusual activity” and a spokeswoman did not answer questions regarding the nature of the attack.
Later on Thursday Medibank said it would be contacting its 3.7 million members, without saying what about, as it moved to bring some of the customer-facing systems it had taken offline back into action.
Jefferies analyst Vanessa Thomson said while it remained unclear whether “policyholder accounts have been compromised nor if any sensitive data has been accessed”, Medibank had access to highly personal data.
“Health insurers store highly confidential personal data and if sensitive data is compromised policyholders could face identity theft, loss of sensitive information as well as the time and effort needed to secure their data going forward,” Ms Thomson said.
Medibank doesn’t know if your data is private after ‘incident’
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ICIJ
:We’re taking you behind-the-scenes of what it was
like to publish one of the most immediately impactful Pandora Papers
investigations at this time, last year.
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš was one of dozens of heads-of-state
uncovered in the files, and the project was launched mere days before
general elections that the populist billionaire was widely expected to
win. But after Pandora Papers findings on his secret offshore deals
overshadowed his re-election campaign, Babiš lost the race by a
razor-thin margin.
In a new
episode of the Meet The Investigators podcast, ICIJ member
Pavla Holcová, founder of Investigace, a Czech center for investigative
journalism, talks about the lessons learned and challenges her team faced
in reporting the explosive story — including negotiating a publication
date with hundreds of Pandora Papers partners.
“We really tried to move the date … We are going to be accused of
influencing elections and so on. We will really get into shitstorm,” says
Pavla. But as a longtime ICIJ partner, she understood that the
compromises needed to make large-scale journalism collaborations work
were well worth the payoff.
“We just said,
‘Yes, we just need to brace ourselves for a really hard time. But let’s
do it.’”
Threats started coming within the hour of the stories going live, Pavla
says. Unfortunately, grave threats were nothing new for her team. In
2018, their colleague Ján Kuciak was murdered while investigating the
Slovak government’s ties to the Italian mafia.
In the podcast, Pavla discusses how reporters in the region used
collaborative journalism to fight back against the murder and shares more
about her remarkable career, her very practical advice for journalists to
avoid burnout, her views on producing investigations that make an impact,
and more.
“You are not writing the story to take down the government … You are
writing the story to inform people,” Pavla says. “For me, the joy came
from the cooperation with other journalists and from sharing and
talking.”
WHISTLEBLOWER
Q&A
We talk to former Boeing manager Ed Pierson, who went
public with intel related to the tragic Boeing airplane crashes in 2018
and 2019, ahead of a panel at this week’s Double Exposure
Investigative Film Festival and Symposium.
FILM FESTIVAL
The Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival and Symposium runs this week from
October 13 to 17 and features panels and online screenings,
including “The Killing of a Journalist” about the murder of Slovak
reporter Ján Kuciak and “The Grab” about nations’ efforts to sweep
disappearing natural resources. Use ICIJ’s 10% discount code ICIJ22 to
purchase tickets.
Thanks for reading!
Asraa Mustufa
ICIJ's digital editor
P.S. If you've enjoyed our coverage this week, remember to
tell your friends and family and share our work on social media.
Send them an email
now!
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