https://amp.abc.net.au/article/101476232
So OPTUS, Australia's second largest telecommunications had the personal information details of 9 million customers, past and present stolen by a hacker. To put this into perspective, Optus has 9.5 million current customers, and Australia has fewer than 26 million people all up. This means that more than 35% of all Australians have potentially had their data stolen. THIRTY FIVE PERCENT. The hacker in question stole the personal information of OPTUS customers such as passport information, driver's licence numbers, etc. Demanding a $1,000,000 ransom from OPTUS. This has lead to a huge investigation by Australian FEDERAL authorities and (for some reason) the FBI in the USA is involved. According to the dark web, the hacker supposedly decided to delete all the stolen information, and ditch the ransom, however, people are supposedly getting texts from the hacker threatening to leak their info to the dark web, unless they pay $2000. This is such a colossal matter that both major political parties are working together, bipartisan, to see what went wrong and to pass future laws to prevent such attacks, and potentially prosecute OPTUS for this one. It's also quite possible that fradulent credit cards have been setting up in the victim's names.
Optus is 100% owned by Singapore based company, SingTel, executives of which have flown over to Optus HQ in Sydney for an emergency meeting. This an ever evolving story, so I'll keep you updated with news as I come across it.
Many people (myself included) are demanding to know why Optus holds on to customer information like passport info and driver's licences for years after the connection has been created, including those of former customers. Anyways, NSG, what do you guys think?
