Optus, the leading Australian telecommunications company, has revealed that a breach of its networks exposed personal information of current and former customers.
In a press release Thursday, Optus said that the names, ages, phone numbers, email addresses and residences of many customers, as well as identification document numbers such as those for driver’s licenses, were hacked.driving or passports.
The company did not specify when the breach occurred but said it contained the problem. Optus, owned by Singapore’s Singtel, is Australia’s second largest telecommunications provider and serves more than 10 million people.
This issue has been reported to the Australian counterpart to the National Security Agency, the Australian Signals Directorate.
As essential components of every nation’s infrastructure, the telecommunications, telephone and mobile giants are common goals. Criminal hackers, such as SIM card changers, often rely heavily on compromised data and internal access to deal with attacks that involve persuading support teams or workers to give up access to their systems. On the contrary, state-backed hackers have been known to raid telecom companies in search of call logs to spy on critics and carry out espionage activities.
Australian telecoms company Optus is the latest widespread target of cybercriminals. In 2015, Australian telecommunications company Telstra revealed that its subsidiary Pacnet, which operates the submarine cable system, had been hacked for weeks.
Earlier this year, US telecom operator T-Mobile announced the network’s eighth settlement due to the theft of its source code by the criminal gang Lapsus$. According to the second largest mobile phone provider in the United States, the data of at least 47 million consumers was compromised last year.
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