MELBOURNE – The second-largest telecommunications company in Australia, Optus, is owned by Singapore Telecommunications. On Saturday, major newspapers ran a full-page apology from Optus for a “devastating” cyberattack that happened 10 days ago. The apology also pointed customers who were affected to a new help site.
In the notice, the company said, “We’re very sorry that a cyberattack happened on our watch.”
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It said, “We know this is terrible and that we’ll have to work hard to win back your trust.”
The new page on the company’s website told customers whose information had been stolen how to change the numbers on their driver’s licences, passports, and health care cards.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Friday that the company has agreed to pay for customers’ passports to be replaced if they were stolen.
Optus said on its website that it would contact customers whose passport numbers had been made public.
Australian police said on Friday that they had set up an operation to protect more than 10,000 Optus customers whose identity credentials had been shared online because of the data breach.
Since the telco giant first said on Sept. 22 that the data of up to 10 million accounts, which is about 40% of Australia’s population, had been stolen, the authorities have not said anything about their investigation or their efforts to find the hacker. (The spelling of “Australia” in the headline has been fixed.)