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In September 2022 private data for around 9 million Optus users was stolen.
In response, the CEO of Optus Australia has offered an emotional apology after customers raged about the hack online. A statement from Optus said that Information which may have been exposed includes customers' names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, and, for a subset of customers, addresses, ID document numbers such as driver's licence or passport numbers.
It is thought that 2.8 million people had all of their details taken, while information for around 7 million people which included DOB, email address, and phone numbers was stolen. Optus is "very sorry" and knows that "customers will be concerned". Optus has said its services were not affected in the breach and remain safe to use, with messages and voice calls not compromised.
Customers have taken to social media to say that the telco had not yet contacted them to make them aware of the breach.
Nothing to worry about. Just another online day in Australia.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by progo on Sunday September 25 2022, @04:01AM (4 children)
Wikipedia says Optus is an Australian wireless carrier with 10.5M customers in 2019. Australia has about 26M residents.
The story isn't "9M Optus accounts compromised" -- it's "All Optus accounts compromised."
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday September 25 2022, @05:37AM (2 children)
If we had used a different headline somebody would have complained that it was too vague. After all, if Optus only had a few hundred accounts and had compromised 'all' of them it would still have been a minor breach when compared to others that we report. Alternatively, if we had used 'All Accounts Hacked' it would have been incorrect and we would also be accused of click-baiting the headlines. We try - and I accept that we don't always succeed - to make the headline useful. More often than not we use the one provided by the source because that way we cannot subsequently be accused of exaggerating any claim or displaying a specific bias.
I cannot accept that the headline in this case is misleading - it is as accurate as it needs to be given they limited space we have for it. It is most certainly newsworthy for the reason you have pointed out, but it is not misleading.
(Score: 2) by progo on Sunday September 25 2022, @07:12PM (1 child)
Sorry I didn't mean to cause offense, and my criticism was meant to be directed upstream at the primary reporters. And you make good points in your reply.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Monday September 26 2022, @01:09AM
No offence was taken, there is no need to apologise.
I was simply trying to explain why we tend to use the original titles more often than not.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26 2022, @11:41PM
OP here. On posting I did not realise Optus served literally half the country. Numbers are from the original article. I will watch this in the future. Thanks for pointing this out.
This story is stil going. Hackers have threatened to release the data.