QUESTIONNAIRE (Reuters) – Australian No . 2 telco Optus, owned simply by Singapore Telecommunications Ltd, said it will contact up to 10 million customers whose private details were consumed a “sophisticated” crack, but added simply no corporate clients were compromised.
Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said the lady was angry and sorry that an offshore-based entity had shattered into the company’s database of customer details, accessing home details, drivers licence plus passport numbers with the country’s biggest cybersecurity breaches.
As much as 9. 8 million accounts may be affected, equivalent to 40% of Australia’s population, but “that is the absolute worst case scenario (and) we have reason to believe which the number is actually smaller sized than that”, Bajuware (umgangssprachlich) Rosmarin said.
Bayer Rosmarin mentioned corporate customers made an appearance unaffected and there is no indication the particular intruder took consumer bank account details or passwords. Police plus cybersecurity authorities were still investigating the attack which Optus told customers about on Thursday.
“We will be determining specifically which customers (were affected) and proactively contacting each customer with very clear explanations of which of the information has been exposed and taken, inch Bayer Rosmarin said in an online press briefing on Fri.
“I’m furious that there are people out there that want to do this to our customers. I’m disappointed that individuals couldn’t have prevented it… and I am just very sorry, ” she added.
She declined to give details of how the attacker breached the company’s safety, citing an ongoing unlawful investigation, but noted the attacker’s IP address – the unique identifier of a personal computer – appeared to move between unspecified countries in Europe.
As a major telco, Optus considered itself a target to get cyber attackers and routinely repelled tries to breach the systems but “this particular one is not similar to anything we’ve seen before, plus unfortunately it was successful”, she said.
(Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing simply by Lincoln Feast. )