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Genevieve Bell’s LinkedIn account has been observed liking “highly offensive” posts and criticising the university’s chancellor, Julie Bishop.
The Australian National University (ANU) is investigating the possible compromise of the LinkedIn account of one of its senior staff after suspicious behaviour was reported by a journalist.
Rick Morton, senior reporter with The Saturday Paper, informed ANU of the activity after observing the account of the vice-chancellor liking several contentious posts and criticising the university’s chancellor, ex-foreign minister Julie Bishop.
“The ‘likes’ were in among normal posts the VC account had liked or reacted to about the work of the university and her former and beloved school, Cybernetics, so it’s a very strange one,” Morton said in a post to Bluesky.
“I look forward to what the investigation finds.”
ANU has said it became aware of the posts on Wednesday morning and is taking the possible incident seriously.
“The LinkedIn account had ‘liked’ certain posts that the VC had never seen,” an ANU spokesperson told The Guardian today (5 June).
“Some of the liked content was highly offensive and objectionable to the VC and which are also inconsistent with the values set by the council for ANU.
“We take this type of behaviour seriously.”
An ANU spokesperson told Cyber Daily that the account compromise has been "referred to authorities".
The posts liked by the vice-chancellor included negative references to Gaza, where Israel is prosecuting a deadly military campaign against the Hamas terrorist group.
ANU has had a rough time lately with its IT environment. It suffered an IT outage late last month that caused disruption to some online systems, and after ransomware gang FSociety claimed to have hacked the university in February, just weeks later ANU confirmed that no incident actually occurred.
However, in November 2024, a subsidiary of the university, ANU Enterprise, confirmed that it was the victim of the ThreeAM ransomware attack.
UPDATED 06/06/25 to add further ANU commentary.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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