Several roles in human resources, customer service, finance, accounting, and network maintenance were outsourced during Singtel ownership; Although Optus still has employees on payroll across the various departments. Several former employees, who all spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing existing roles, said some Singaporean Optus leaders preferred not to hear about the problems. The former employees added that this situation has moved to Australia.
Optus also has a history of privacy issues. In 2014, it admitted to mistakenly releasing the names of about 122,000 customers to the phone book, even though they asked to be excluded, a service often used by people like domestic violence survivors. At the time, Optus blamed a system bug, rather than the hack, and apologized. But in 2019, it admitted to putting another 50,000 people in the phonebook without their permission. Once again he apologized and blamed a “system error”. The matter is under investigation by the Privacy Commissioner. And in 2018, the high-profile Floptus saga endured as the online World Cup failed to broadcast to many fans, prompted further apologies.
Optus defended its investments and practices in cybersecurity. All of its employees do the required security and compliance training. The company did not directly answer questions about this story, but did provide a statement from its head of regulatory and public affairs, Andrew Sheridan, saying that it highly appreciates the support it has received from the government.
“We are working closely with the government, including through the recently established federal government working group on the entire government response to cyberattack,” Sheridan said. “We have worked closely with more than 20 government agencies and authorities on the cyber attack. The engagement could not be more constructive.”
The Optus structure flows upward into Singapore through an advisory panel that includes a group of prominent Australians. They include David Gonsky, John Murchill, and Paul O’Sullivan, none of whom have direct responsibility for cybersecurity. None of them have publicly commented on the hack, though Singtel issued a public statement affirming its commitment to cybersecurity, its customers and the Australian leadership team, including CEO Bayer Rosmarin.
Also remaining silent was Optus’ head of business and projects, Gladys Berejiklian, who is responsible for government relations, and its chief information officer Mark Potter.
Bayer Rosmarin, described by several previous Optus insiders as ambitious, assertive and meticulous, was the face of the response. Educated at Stanford University, she started working for software companies but came to Australia and quickly climbed into the Commonwealth Bank during a 14-year period.
Bayer Rosmarine was once seen as a challenger to the bank’s CEO position, losing to current chairman Matt Komen and then leaving with a group of her colleagues as the bank came under scrutiny from the Royal Commission on Financial Services. But it still has supporters in the financial world. Former Bank President Ian Narev was full of praise for her in 2021 Sydney Morning Herald And the age Profile, calling Bayer Rosmarine brave, intelligent and a “disruptive thinker.” In 2019, she was appointed Executive Vice President of Optus and one year later rose to the highest position, her first as CEO, where she had been relatively low prior to the hack.
Prior to the hack, Optus CEO Kelly Beyer Rosmaryn had a relatively low public profile, but he was working with some business leader Q&A.attributed to him:Natalie Pogue
While Bayer Rosmarin’s personality is the type to be prized in the upper echelons of Australian companies, people familiar with it suggest it may also help explain Optus’ decision to clash with government, media and experts over the details of the hack rather than a purely one. Apologetic and cooperative line.
On September 28, media analyst and reporter Tim Burroughs said that the crisis remaining on the front page six days after the hack was announced was a communications failure. Burroughs wrote in his book It will be a case study of crisis management courses not made the news.
But six days later, the saga remained prominent after Bayer Rosmarine gave another round of challenging interviews. She went on to suggest that people calling the hack “essential,” a group that includes Home Affairs Secretary Claire O’Neill, “do not speak from a knowledgeable position.”
(Most cyber security experts believe O’Neill’s version of events, but the full report by Deloitte that Optus has not been finalized. It will not be made public for security reasons. Other ways in which the nature of the breach can be confirmed publicly, such as lawsuits or an investigation by Privacy Commissioner, it could take years.)
Government Services Secretary Bill Shorten and Home Affairs Secretary Claire O’Neill reignited the Optus hack saga when they accused the company of being slow in responding to government requests for information.attributed to him:Paul Jeffers
Optus picked another fight when it announced that it was shocked by criticism on October 2 from O’Neill and Government Services Secretary Bill Shorten for its belated transmission of information on people whose Medicare and Centrelink numbers and passports had been taken.
The company’s opinion was that it had until October 4 to deliver the data, which the government did not object to. Some advocates for the company agree, seeing it as a victim of early criticism from a government that hopes to ride the wave of popular discontent and avoid scrutiny as to whether it is doing enough to help Australians. But its approach still drew a rebuke from Shorten, who saw the company’s communication with his management as missing until Optus bowed to public pressure.
“When you have a problem, just reach out and get the help you need,” Shorten said in public comments openly directed at Optus’ senior leadership team. “Listen to the lawyers later. Listen to the people telling you how to cover your ass later. The problem is the horse has run away.”
Two cybersecurity professionals, who did not want to speak out to avoid jeopardizing relationships in Canberra, questioned whether the government’s outrage at Optus was wise, even if it was factually true. They feared that this would discourage other companies from reporting cybersecurity breaches, even though there are laws that require many companies to report them. Others saw O’Neill and Shorten as justified in their annoyance.
Optus has also been looked at by the federal government. In one example, on September 26, O’Neill called on Optus to provide free credit monitoring to customers, something the company was already working on. This step means that Optus cannot claim the full credit. It also had to wrangle with millions of customer records and deal with more than 20 state and federal agencies as they tried to identify people whose personal identification numbers were taken in the hack, and had to replace their cards. It has had to communicate with customers and the media about those actions while the federal police and other law enforcement agencies try to find the intruder, which Bayer Rosmarine says has limited what she can say publicly.
A week ago, Optus began taking the steps that telecom experts recommended for several days. It bought full-page apology ads in national newspapers and brought in experienced crisis relations specialists, bolstering the company’s relatively small business relations team led by Sheridan.
Its main and largest competitor, Telstra, has a fleet of offshore corporate lobbyists and an extensive government relations team. By contrast, Optus has no registered external lobbyists. It’s a strategy that some previous insiders said would make sense in Singapore, where Temasek, the main owner of Singtel, is a well-connected state wealth fund, but unusual for a large company in Australia. For its part, Optus believes that using its own government affairs department is a more effective means of lobbying.
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But in other ways, Optus appears to be in line with parts of the government. On Friday, Bayer Rosmarin joined a discussion with a working group of nine state and federal agencies. The day before, Communications Secretary Michelle Rowland and Attorney General Mark Dreyfuss unveiled changes to communications privacy rules to allow phone companies to share more information with banks and the government to help stop fraud. That solves a problem identified by Optus, Roland said on ABC Radio.
However, Optus’ relationships with unions, which can be a way for companies to establish relationships with workers, are limited. Shane Murphy, as head of the National Telecom Federation representing workers in telecom companies, compares the two large telephone companies. Acknowledging that Telstra, which has more unionized employees, had a big head start from its days as a government monopoly, Murphy said the company “remains more sophisticated, better prepared, better at what it does”: “It’s not industrially perfect – We’ve had many fights, including industrial strikes – but the way they operate at the moment is very different from Optus.”
For years, Vodafone, Australia’s third largest phone network, has carried a heavy cross. The 2012 “Vodafail” title you earned due to network unreliability won’t go away. An executive at another telecom company said the breach was a bad blow to Optus. “We have seen a 30-fold increase in the number of people applying for jobs from Optus,” this person said.
So far, it is not possible to determine the financial cost to Optus of the breach, as well as how long it will live in customers’ memory. With most phone contracts lasting two years, Bayer Rosmarin and Optus are hoping the memories will be short.
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Originally published at Melbourne News Vine
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