Optus must fix blunder as reputation held to ransom by hacker

If Optus wants to keep customers after having private data hacked, it better start offering some pretty big benefits, argues Joe Hildebrand.

Almost 10 million Optus customers have potentially had their private data hacked and the hacker is now releasing 10,000 personal records a day until their ransom demand is met.

But don’t worry guys, because according to the Optus CEO, the company is not the villain.

“We definitely know that this is the work of some bad actors, and really they are the villains in this sorry,” Kelly Bayer Rosmarin told ABC Radio.

Gosh, that’s a relief. I know when Optus sent me an email saying my personal information had been stolen — days after the story was revealed in the media — my first response was: “Gee, I hope the company doesn’t suffer any reputational damage as a result of this!”

And as for the assertion that the hackers are bad guys, well thank God we were told. Otherwise how would we ever have known?

Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin.

And what formidable bad guys they are to have taken on the might of a multinational telco and won.

Judging by the person claiming to be the Optus hacker on the dark web, they don’t seem to have quite reached genius supervillain status.

“If $1M US pay [sic] then data will be deleted from drive. Only 1 copy exist. Will not sale[sic] data too. Completely gone! 4 more day to decide Optus!” they wrote.

“Since they not payed [sic] yet here is 10,000 record from address file. Will release 10,000 record every day for 4 day when they not pay.”

If Optus is really worried about its reputation, they better hope this isn’t really the hacker because it sounds like they have been outsmarted by an illiterate six-year-old.

Meanwhile, Optus is protesting that it shouldn’t have to face increased fines for such data breaches, because they wouldn’t “benefit anybody”.

They certainly wouldn’t benefit Optus but they might just benefit whatever customers it
has left.

And if Optus wants to keep them, it better start offering some pretty big benefits of its own.