The Department of Health has withdrawn the supposedly anonymised set of MBS and PBS data it recently released into the public domain after cryptography and security experts from the University of Melbourne discovered some of the provider numbers it contains can be decrypted.

In a statement issued today, the department revealed that Vanessa Teague, a senior lecturer in Melbourne University's Department of Computing and Information Systems best known for her work on electronic voting, had alerted it that it was possible to decrypt some ID numbers, which are issued to doctors and other clinicians providing MBS and PBS-funded healthcare services.