Overseas hackers breached the Queensland Transport Department's security network last year, before attempting to steal information from staff members from other sections of government.

The cyber breach occurred in December, according to details obtained by ABC News under a Right to Information request.

The Department of Transport and Main Roads holds information such as names, addresses and dates of birth, but it insists no sensitive information was released and there was a low risk any data was stolen.

The intruders gained access to two official email accounts before sending out a series of emails to other government departments and personal addresses as part of a "phishing" attempt.

Phishing is the act of obtaining passwords and other sensitive information by tricking victims into entering their details on web pages that appear to be genuine.

A spokeswoman said the breach occurred at 3:00am but was discovered and shut down within five hours.

"The identified IP addresses were blocked and passwords of two compromised accounts were changed," the spokeswoman said.

"All internal staff and threat intelligence partners were contacted and asked to block the fake website referred to in the phishing email.

"A review of both TMR accounts confirmed no sensitive information was released and there was a low risk any data was released."

The department tracked the source of the attack to internet addresses in Kenya and Canada, although cyber experts believe real IP addresses are often disguised.

The attack came about six months after the department issued a warning to drivers to be aware of fake licence renewal scam emails in June.

Documents show the department effectively blocked about 996,000 malicious attacks on the network over the past year and discovered a further 1,382 emails laden with new viruses.

In 2015, personal details of more than 600 Queensland school students were stolen after a separate government department was hacked.

Major organisations a 'huge target' for hackers

Cyber security analyst Patrick Gray said the breach on the Department of Transport in December sounds like a "very typical" hack.

"Quite often what you'll see is an attacker might obtain the username and password for a user but they might only be able to do limited things with that information."

"So then what they might do is use that user's email account to phish other users within the organisation saying things like 'Hey you need to click here to change your VPN password'.

"That might take that second user on to a page they (the hackers) can control so they can capture that person's real username and password for the VPN."

Mr Gray said departments or organisations that deal with large amounts of crucial data are often in the firing line.

"Any organisation holding the licence numbers of all Queenslanders is going to be a huge target — simply because we rely in Australia on licence numbers to authenticate ourselves for a broad range of transactions and purposes," he said.

"I imagine that data would be highly sought after by all sorts of different criminal enterprises."

"We see news of breaches effecting all sorts of organisations pretty much every day of the week these days and it's not because everyone is incompetent — it's because this stuff is quite difficult.

"If it was easy to fix this, everyone would have fixed this by now."