Optus has finally offered some clarity following the data breach almost two weeks ago with news that more than two million customers had personal identification documents stolen by hackers.
Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin delivered a video message to break down the numbers of customers affected after working with more than 20 Federal, State and Territory government agencies and departments.
Here’s what we know:
– 1.2 million customers have had at least one piece of personally identifiable information compromised. This includes driver’s licence, Medicare card number, passport. Optus says it has already contacted these customers and recommended they change their identification documents.
– 900,000 customers have had numbers of expired IDs exposed.
– 7.7 million customers had personal information like email, address, date of birth or phone numbers. These customers don’t need to take any action other than remaining vigilant.
“We have been working collaboratively with other organisations, government departments and more than 20 licencing authorities to obtain the right information so that we could inform and update our customers,” Ms Bayer Rosmarin said.
OPTUS CALLS IN INDEPENDENT FORENSIC INVESTIGATORS TO LOOK INTO DATA BREACH
“We also had to meticulously reconstruct from logs exactly what information they had been able to access so that any information we provided to customers was accurate and complete.
“This was an exercise that we wish we could have done instantly but it did take us some time to do so, and we also had to work with licencing authorities, all of whom have different rules, all of whom have different information that’s required in order to validate checks on those types of IDs.”
Ms Bayer Rosmarin also took the opportunity to apologise to customers for the data breach.
“We are deeply, deeply sorry that this could occur especially because we genuinely care about safeguarding our customers information and we invest millions of dollars and have teams of people whose job it is to prevent something like this from happening,” she said
“That is why we have launched an independent review into what has occurred so we can understand what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again and that we do better.”
