Optus admits hack failures, but says customer growth is back

Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said the telco had learned its lessons from the hack response, after underestimating the public understanding of the crisis.

Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin addresses customers in a video.

Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said she underestimated the blow-up the telco’s hack late last year would cause, telling a crowd she failed to properly explain the massive task ahead for the telco to customers.

Speaking at a business conference in Sydney on Wednesday, Ms Bayer Rosmarin, said Optus’ response to the hack, which saw the records of as many as 9.7 million current and former customers accessed, was not perfect.

“Not every aspect of (the government’s) response was perfect, just like not every aspect of Optus’ response was perfect,” she said. “There is no company in Australia trying harder to be better and protect our customers from future threats.”

Ms Bayer Rosmarin told the audience she didn’t “sufficiently” explain the level or complexity of the hack “and the volume of work we were undertaking at Optus and what was required in a cyber incident of this magnitude”.

“I assumed a much higher level of knowledge and awareness of international incidents,” she said. “I really would have explained what we had to go through in those days, that we had to try and recreate what we thought the hacker had taken by analysing 20 terabytes of raw log files.”

Optus was attacked over the hack, with members of the government questioning how the telco heavyweight could have allowed customer data to be accessed.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin said the media attention around the hack, which saw reporters camp outside her $15m Vaucluse house, “wasn’t always focused on what they should have been”.

“I was choosing to work from somewhere else because there were reporters stalking me and I hadn’t been able to leave the house in 10 days,” she said.

She said she had retained the support of Optus’ board and retained “the full backing of my team”. Optus is currently grappling with a string of reviews commissioned into the telco after the hack was ventilated in late last year.

This includes Deloitte’s review, which Optus commissioned to examine its security systems, controls and processes.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and the Australian Communications and Media Authority along with the Federal Police were also called in by the federal government to investigate the hack.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin said the reviews were putting a strain on the telco and its staff with “each demanding their own questions and angles”.

“It is a complex situation with voluminous data to analyse,” she said. Ms Bayer Rosmarin said Optus hoped the Deloitte review would show the telco “ways we can improve”.

Rival telco Telstra revealed in its recent interim results it had gained 68,000 new postpaid customers after the Optus data breach.

But Ms Bayer Rosmarin said Optus was “already back in the position of being net customer profitable” and was growing its customer base again.