Optus has begun notifying some of their customers directly if they have been impacted by the massive data breach.

Andrew Sheridan, Vice President of Regulatory & Public Affairs at Optus told Mark Gibson on Perth Live that the attack has now been shut down.

“Because of the nature of the attack, it is now a criminal investigation – but the key point is that our network and services are secure,” Mr Sheridan said.

“We are not completely sure of the exact number but the worst case scenario is that 9.8 million accounts have had some data accessed. As we complete those investigations we think it’ll be a lower number.”

Speculations grew fast throughout Friday that Optus did in fact have knowledge of the data breach on Wednesday and only alerted customers on Thursday.

“We identified the breach throughout the course of Wednesday but we then had to go through processes and investigations to determine the exact nature of the breach and whether customer information had been accessed or not. So this took a number of hours into the night and Thursday.

“We then made the decision to inform customers as quickly as possible – we are now following up with direct communication.”

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