Australia’s current administration is calling for stronger privacy laws, following last week’s cybersecurity breach that compromised personal data of 9.8 million Optus customers. Describing the cyber attack as “not technologically challenging”, the government says the breach should never have happened and that Optus should pay to rectify the situation.
When customers give their personal data to companies, they expect the information to be kept safe, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in parliament Wednesday. Calling the Optus data breach “a great concern”, he said the incident should serve as a wakeup call to businesses in Australia.
The mobile operator last week reported a security breach that it said compromised various customer data, including dates of birth, email addresses, and passport numbers. Information belonging to both current and former customers were impacted, Optus said, which its CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin later said was the result of a “sophisticated” attack that infiltrated multiple security layers.
The telco, though, has yet to provide further details on how the breach occurred or what systems were breached. Local reports have pointed to an online API (application programming interface) that apparently did not require authentication or authorisation for customer data to be accessed.
Albanese said the government was working with Optus to obtain the necessary information “to conduct a criminal investigation” led by the Australian Federal Police, in cooperation with the FBI.
“We know that this breach should never have happened,” the prime minister said. “Clearly we need better national laws after a decade of inaction to manage the immense amount of data collected by companies about Australians, and clear consequences for when they do not manage it well.”
He dismissed calls from the oppo ..
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