It can happen to any company: Cyber expert’s grim hack warning

A leading cybersecurity expert has said that no business is immune from having their data stolen by hackers.

A leading cybersecurity expert has said that no business is immune from having their data stolen by hackers and the government must urgently come up with a code to ensure companies that are hit by cyber attacks quickly move to protect their customers.

“There should be a process whereby Optus would be made to send a memo to every financial institution saying they had a hack and that they should put in place measures to make sure people applying for credit are genuine,” author and cybersafety expert Susan McLean said.

“The government has to look at making sure there is a way to communicate quickly and consistently with these things happen.”

Ms McLean said that the personal information that was compromised in the Optus hack was “far more valuable than passwords.”

“When someone can pretend to be me or anyone with 100 points of data that’s a concern.

Screen grab of the personal data of Optus customers released publicly after the security breach earlier this week.

“In the old days you had to go into the bank physically to get credit and now you can be approved in 90 seconds for $5,000 or $10,000 or more.

“Once hackers have key points of identification it’s very easy to rough up BAS statements or pay stubs so they can look like you.”

Susan McLean, cybersafety expert and educator, and former police officer, says the government must do more to protect consumers.

Ms McLean added that banks, telecommunications firms, and media giants have all been subject to attacks in recent years with varying degrees of success.

Sony Pictures was famously compromised in 2014, she said, while last year Channel 9 was subject to a cyberattack that left many of its systems offline for months.

Ms McLean also said that the government need to have the power to “jump on companies that do not properly encrypt their data from great height”.

The opposition has proposed free replacement passports for victims of the Optus hack.

The comments come as the federal opposition proposed the automatic issuing of new passports to victims of the Optus hack to help prevent identity theft.

“What (the government) needs to be doing is working through the solutions, they should have done that by now,” shadow home affairs spokeswoman Karen Andrews said Wednesday.

“If that means there needs to be passports replaced, then I think they should be seriously looking at that because that data is used for a range of checks.

“It’s very easy to do, although clearly there’s problems that the government hasn’t got on top of in relation to processing passports anyway.”

Meanwhile the federal government is considering options for Australians whose Medicare details were impacted, furious it took five days to be notified that Medicare data had been caught up the Optus data breach.

Nearly 10 million Australians had their data – ranging from full names and addresses to passports and drivers’ licences – accessed in the broad-ranging incident that hit the database last Thursday.

It wasn’t revealed until Tuesday, however, that some Medicare information had also been caught up in the breach.