West Australian Premier Mark McGowan has apologised after a child intercepted confidential Health Department messages and published them online.

The internal messages were originally transmitted using a pager service and included the names and details of people being treated for COVID-19.

Mr McGowan said police have visited the child responsible and have shut down the website.

“It was a person under the age of 16 who obviously spends a lot of their life online, and did this sort of thing as some young people do,” he said.

“If anyone’s private information has been published, of course I’m sorry.

“That obviously shouldn’t have occurred, and to those people we’ll get to the bottom of who they were and make sure we contact them.”

Mr McGowan said a full investigation would also look into what other agencies might be using paging services and whether sensitive information was being transmitted.

Premier unaware pagers still in use

The Premier said he had been unaware of the personal details being compromised until a television news report on Monday night.

Mr McGowan also said he thought pagers had all but disappeared after the 1990s, and he was not aware they were still being used by some Government services.

“Apparently you can still buy them, and some people still use them,” he said.

“The fact they were used for secure information and could be hacked, I didn’t know, but some people out there obviously knew this.

“SMSs [text messages] apparently are far more secure, and Health will move to that, and we’re going to look to whether other Government instrumentalities that may use pagers need to go to that system.”

The paging service has been used by the Government for the past 12 years and Mr McGowan said the Health Department and other agencies had continued using it as it was more reliable than SMS.

“Sometimes SMS’s don’t get through — now, that was news to me — but that is the reason they were doing it.

“The fact there was secure information being transmitted in that way, I think is a problem, if it was publicly available information it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.”

Vodafone warns against pagers

The pager service was operated by Vodafone, which issued a statement in response to the website data breach.

“Paging networks send messages using legacy radio technology which is not able to be encrypted, unlike mobile phone networks which use encryption to protect customer communications,” a Vodafone spokeswoman said.

“We encourage customers not to use paging services to send sensitive information.

“As soon as we became aware of a website illegally publishing paging messages, we took immediate action and had it shut down within hours.

Department ‘dismayed’ by breach

The Department of Health released its own statement, saying it was “dismayed” by the data breach.

But a spokesman said the department had reviewed its own data systems and they remained “secure”.

It said it would also investigate whether staff using the service to transmit sensitive information were aware it was not encrypted.

The Health Department has stopped using the service overnight and shifted to a “double SMS” system instead.

The State Opposition labelled the data leak as “absolutely shocking”.

Its Public Sector Integrity spokesman, Tjorn Sibma, said the Government must now ensure sensitive information was only transmitted using a properly encrypted system.

Cheaper Perth to Kimberley flights

Western Australia recorded no new cases of COVID-19 today and the Premier indicated an announcement on phase five of eased restrictions in the state would be made later in the week.

Phase five had been due to be introduced three days ago, but was delayed in light of the coronavirus outbreak in Melbourne.

Mr McGowan also today announced a program to make flights more affordable between Perth and the Kimberley as interstate holidays would remain off limits for West Australians for some time.