A cyberattack targeting the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR) has caused significant disruptions to the research community. The incident, which occurred on February 24, 2025, led to the ANZCTR website being taken offline. Sydney University, which operates the registry, immediately identified the cyberattack and took swift action to secure its systems. The university assured the public that its internal systems remained unaffected by the attack, and no health data had been compromised in the breach.
Despite the lack of health data exposure, personal information, such as contact details and passwords, was reportedly exposed.
Those who received email notifications about the breach were advised to change their passwords and stay alert for potential phishing attacks. While the data breach did not compromise critical health information, it still caused considerable inconvenience to those impacted. Researchers who rely on ANZCTR for registering clinical trials were left stranded without access to the platform.
It plays a key role in ensuring transparency and ethical standards in clinical research.
The ANZCTR is a vital resource for clinical trials in Australia, New Zealand, and beyond, serving as the largest public registry in the region. Researchers are required to register their trials on the platform, which publicly discloses important trial details such as study goals and methodologies. This transparency ensures the credibility and reliability of clinical research. The registry also shares trial information with the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP), an agency under the World Health Organization (WHO), facilitating global access to essential research data.
The outage of ANZCTR has resulted in delays for researchers, who are unable to proceed with registering their trials. The university has recommended that researchers use alternative clinical trial registries for the time being. However, with no clear timeline for when ANZCTR operations will be fully restored, frustration continues to grow among the affected scientific community. This incident underscores the critical importance of secure and resilient systems for clinical trials and highlights the need for transparency in research.
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