CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
The people of Australia are today wondering if we are supposed to just pretend that one of our country’s biggest Telco companies didn’t just allow a random cybercriminal to access potentially half the population’s personal details.
This comes less than a couple weeks after Optus briefly thought it was worth mentioning that their systems sustained a significant cyberattack that resulted in a major data breach of both current and former customers’ personal information, including customers’ names, dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses.
While it is believed that a smaller subset of customers having their street addresses, driving licence details and passport numbers leaked – the majority of private details leaked definitely provide enough information for cybercriminals to begin applying for a line of credit, or just flat out stealing our identities.
However, with this news kind of just drifting out of the news cycle – Australians are wondering if this has been resolved, or are we just going to pretend it didn’t happen?
Before everyone stopped talking about this, Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin urged customers to exercise “heightened awareness” regarding transactions with their Optus and other accounts. Rosmarin emphasised that passwords were not compromised – which is great news for anyone who was worried that the hacker might be making free phone calls with their account info.
However, she did iterate that the “worst-case scenario” regarding the number of customers whose data had been leaked was 9.8 million current and past customers. Which is not far off close to half of the Australian population.
With some Australians revealing that they’ve started beginning to receive letters informing them that they are one of these compromised customer, it is not yet certain what else – other than literally posting a letter – that Optus plans to do about this unfortunate situation that they have allowed to unfold.
Probably nothing. So lets just forget about all of this haha.
