Australia’s largest telecoms firm Telstra Corp Ltd said on Tuesday it had suffered what it called a small data breach, a disclosure that comes two weeks after its main rival Optus was left reeling by a massive cyberattack.<\/p>\n
Telstra, which has 18.8 million customer accounts equivalent to three-quarters of Australia’s population, said an intrusion of a third-party organisation exposed some employee data dating back to 2017.<\/p>\n
According to local media, a Telstra internal staff email put the number of affected current and former employees at 30,000.<\/p>\n
The data that was taken was “very basic in nature”, limited to names and email addresses, a company spokesperson said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“We believe it’s been made available now in an attempt to profit from the Optus breach,” the spokesperson also said without elaborating.<\/p>\n
Telstra did not comment on the number of people affected or when the breach occurred, but said it affected current and former staff only.<\/p>\n
Australia’s telecommunications, financial and government sectors have been on high alert since Optus disclosed on Sept. 22 that a breach of its systems that may have compromised up to 10 million people’s accounts. The data exposed included home addresses, drivers’ licenses and passport numbers.<\/p>\n
Optus owner Singapore Telecommunications Ltd has said it is assessing the potential cost of the attack, while law firms contemplate class action suits.<\/p>\n
The Australian government, which believes the breach was due to a basic security gap, has continued to slam Optus for describing the attack as sophisticated and for delays in updating affected customers.<\/p>\n
“Optus senior management are kidding themselves if they want a medal for the way that they’ve been communicating,” Government Services Minister Bill Shorten told reporters on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“Not even a crocodile’s going to swallow that.”<\/p>\n
An Optus spokesperson declined to comment on Shorten’s remarks, but said the company was working as quickly as possible to provide accurate updates to impacted customers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Australia’s largest telecoms firm Telstra Corp Ltd said on Tuesday it had suffered what it called a small data breach, a disclosure that comes two weeks after its main rival Optus was left reeling by a massive cyberattack. Telstra, which has 18.8 million customer accounts equivalent to three-quarters of Australia’s population, said an intrusion of a third-party organisation exposed some employee data dating back to 2017. According to local media, a Telstra internal staff email put the number of affected current and former employees at 30,000. The data that was taken was “very basic in nature”, limited to names and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-799567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecom"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799567\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}