Yr 5-Min Explainer On How The Optus Data Breach Happened And The Likelihood Of More Attacks

Optus, One of Australia’s biggest telecommunications companies, had a data breach last week and personal information of millions of customers was held to ransom. Optus said this was a “sophisticated” attack, but the federal Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said Optus “left the window open” for what was a pretty “basic” breach. The account which claimed to be the hacker since apologised and said they deleted it all — after they leaked the data of at least 10,000 people on Monday, mind you, but there’s no way of knowing so the 10 million victims are now pretty much on their own. So how did the Optus hack happen and what’s the likelihood of it happening again? We asked a couple of experts about cybersecurity practices and Australian privacy laws.

What exactly is a data breach and why do hackers do it?