The National Health Practitioner Ombudsman and Privacy Commissioner’s website was unavailable for several hours on Tuesday evening, leading to concerns of a serious data breach and embarrassment for the government as it attempts to quell privacy concerns over its new digital health record system.

A "misconfiguration" of the web server hosting the site led to the homepage displaying an index of all the files hosted on it, including what appeared to be a number of databases, back-ups and log-in credentials.

Alastair MacGibbon, Deputy Secretary National Cyber Security Advisor, said the breach was due to a "misconfiguration". Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Alastair MacGibbon, head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre, said late on Tuesday evening that his immediate understanding was that "the website has not been hacked - it was being updated and obviously they didn't check it", resulting in the error.