Australia’s Optus says up to 10 million customers caught in cyber attack

Optus, Australia’s second-largest telecom and owned by Singapore Telecommunications Ltd, has said that it will contact up to 10 million customers whose personal information was stolen in a “sophisticated” attack. According to Bayer Rosmarin, business clients were unaffected, and there was no evidence that the attacker stole customer bank account information or passwords. Police and cybersecurity experts were still looking into the hack, which Optus informed consumers about on Thursday.

Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin expressed her outrage and regret that an overseas corporation had broken into the company’s database of customer information, acquiring home addresses, driver’s licenses and passport details in one of the country’s largest cybersecurity breaches. She declined to elaborate on how the attacker infiltrated the company’s security, citing an ongoing criminal investigation, but she did observe that the attacker’s IP address – a computer’s unique identification – appeared to shift between several European nations.

Optus, as a large telecom, saw itself as a target for cyber attacks and constantly rebuffed efforts to enter its systems, but “this specific one is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and regrettably it was successful,” she added.