Australia’s No. 2 telecoms firm Optus, hit by a massive data breach, said on Tuesday its cyber defenses were strong, contradicting government analysis, as reports emerged that hackers had exposed data for tens of thousands of customers. Australia’s federal government accused Optus of the breach, flagging a review of privacy rules and other fines, suggesting the company had “really left a window open” for hackers to steal data.
Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said there was a lot of “misinformation”. “Since we are not allowed to say much because the police have asked us not to, I can say that our data was encrypted and we had multiple protection players,” Rosmarin told.”So it’s not a case of some completely exposed API (application programming interface) sitting there somewhere,” Rosmarin added. An API allows two or more computer programs to communicate with each other.
Rosmarin said Optus notified authorities following the government’s initial assessment of the incident. She said most customers understand that “we are not villains” and that the company did nothing intentionally to compromise data. Singapore Telecoms-owned Optus revealed last week that the home addresses, driver’s licenses and passport numbers of up to 10 million customers were compromised in one of Australia’s largest data breaches.
Australian media reported that the hackers had released the information of about 10,000 customers on an online forum and threatened to release more unless Optus paid $1 million in cryptocurrency. Rosmarin said “the Australian Federal Police (AFP) is looking into all of this. The AFP said it was working closely with overseas law enforcement agencies to track down the perpetrators.
The Australian Council of Financial Regulators, which includes the central bank, said on Tuesday that its members were working together in response to the cyber attack. Australia’s No. 2 telco Optus, government clash over massive data breach
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