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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: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday September 27 2022, @05:32AM
It sounds really archaic, but a lot of fraud for _big_ things (change of property title, sale of large shareholdings) could be avoided by no longer allowing these transactions to be online-only.
For most people, a property purchase is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Requiring someone to show up in person to sign the papers (along with ID etc) would massively reduce the threat of fraud while creating a relatively minor inconvenience for many (who would probably be more than happy about it when told that it reduces the chance that they will be swindled out of their life savings down the track).
Should I need to physically turn up to a Telco store in order to obtain a phone number? Maybe! This can be mitigated for business accounts by allocating a range of numbers at one time, so that the poor peon in IT isn't making daily trips to the store.
This will obviously have more of an impact on some people (e.g. remote and rural residents, shift workers etc), but it would be safer than what we have today.