When companies and governments emphasise that no passwords or financial information were exposed, they focus on things that are easily changed or replaced. For some people, having an abusive ex-partner learn their current address from a data breach is life-threatening.
And while most Optus customers have ‘mere’ financial fraud to worry about, their life now contains a lot of tedious, expensive, and time-consuming tasks like setting up credit monitoring, changing licence numbers and getting new passports.Optus positioned itself early on in the crisis as a hapless victim, despite claims in parliament that they had contributed to the breach.
to the internet, in effect providing customer details to anyone looking. If this is accurate, then it wasn’t ‘sophisticated’; it was negligent.Optus is a billion-dollar corporation, and its executives are paid millions to ensure that, among other things, its customer data is safe. These are the people who should be held to account for Optus’ failure to properly protect the information customers entrusted them with.
A series of choices were made that lead up to this event, and it is only right that serious and pointed questions should be asked of the people who made those decisions. If this feels unfair or unreasonable, they should feel free to resign so that someone else who is up to the task can do it instead.You can’t lose what you don’t have. If Optus had collected less data from people, and hadn’t held it for as long, it wouldn’t have been quite so vulnerable to leaking the data to anyone. But companies have placed far too much value on collecting and keeping as much personal data as they can.
💯 The 'we are devastated' media release made me feel like a gaslighting narcissist was breaking up with me. Um, we're the victims here Optus