Optus: Its Customers’ Private Information Exposed by a Data Breach

As you would of no doubt heard in the media, Optus announced it has been the victim of a sophisticated cyber-attack targeting customer data as far back as 2017.

Optus is a well-known name in the Australian telecommunications industry. Owned by Singtel, the service company already had 10.5 million subscribers in 2019. It was September 22nd 2022, when news broke out that a giant data breach was reported, leaving almost 40% of the Australian population affected by the situation.

Customer’s names, dates of birth, contact details, addresses and ID document numbers such as passports and driver’s licenses have been reported to be taken.

The hackers then published the following message: “Optus, if you are reading! Price for us to not sell data is $1,000,000 USD we give you one week to decide”. 

Since the release of the breach and the ransom, the number of online reactions exploded.

So how can we understand the breadth and impact of the public conversation around the cyber-attack?

Using Sprinklr, we took the topic of the Optus data breach, applied filters and produced a figure which presents quite explicitly the public interest of the topic.

We counted 45K mentions globally and 38K within Australia during the week following the event. Regarding the hashtags most often used, we can identify the following : 

#Auspol #Optus #CyberSecurity #OptusDataBreach #OptusFail

Moreover, the emotions people feel about the breach are concentrated around anger, disgust, and sadness.

Therefore, understanding and following this situation is crucial as it implies the security of Australia’s inhabitants. For this purpose, online conversation monitoring empowers organisations to understand publicly accessible unstructured data and take actions across communications, strategy, and service design.

On the other hand, most of the mentions were published on Twitter (65%) and in the news (17%); the users are mostly speaking of driver's licenses, passport details, and passwords, which make us understand what the current main concerns of the population are.

At the moment, the most trending topics in public conversation are about how to make understandable for everyone the importance of personal data and the risks that go with it. The public is also advising watching for scams after the Optus data breach.

Online conversation monitoring can empower organisations to understand publicly accessible unstructured data and take action across communications, strategy, and service design.

For everything from communications to engagement to evolving policies, check out some of the real-time analytics emerging from the Optus data breach: https://lnkd.in/gSWMgYMf