Australia Phones Cyber-Attack Exposes Personal Data

Australia's second-largest telecommunications company, Optus, has reported a cyber-attack. The breach exposed customers' names, dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses. From a report: The company - which has more than ten million subscribers - says it has shut down the attack but not before other details such as driver's licences and passport numbers were hacked. Optus says payment data and account passwords were not compromised. The company said it would notify those at "heightened risk" but all customers should check their accounts. Chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin apologised to its customers, on ABC TV. She said names, dates of birth and contact details had been accessed, "in some cases" the driving licence number, and in "a rare number of cases the passport and the mailing address" had also been exposed. The company had notified the Australian Federal Police after noticing "unusual activity." And investigators were trying "to understand who has been accessing the data and for what purpose."

It's not serious..

[invictusvoyd]

Optus says payment data and account passwords were not compromised

Everything else which generally cannot be changed has been compromised.. That's all..

Re:

[luvirini]

Well, payment data combined with the other information would maybe had been still worse. Not that all those things are not really bad thing even without it.

Disturbing Denial

[Canberra1]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/20... [abc.net.au] It is not human error to over-ride the head of ICT security, or test high risk interfaces that transcend firewalls. Lets hope the cyber insurance policy underwriters pay nothing, if that is the case. Test environments should never touch production data. Normally you have sanitized scrambled test data. But this is also expensive to maintain. Lets hope each compromised client get $10,000 because apparently it is illegal to purchase data, yet EU fines have been nowhere near

Only current customs or historic?

[sectokia]

Most people in Australia would have used optus at one point.

Timing could not be better.

[flashflood]

The Australian government is finalising a review into privacy laws.

Optus has repeatedly opposed more stringent privacy laws in formal submissions.

The new Australian government will not wish to appear weak on this front - if they were not already planning to strengthen laws (and I suspect that they were), then they certainly will be now. Emboldened by the Optus leak, they may go even further than originally planned, knowing that business will be reluctant to publicly attack any such reforms in the wake of th