Optus ‘lawyering up’ over breach and it’s not a good look, says Minister
Optus should focus on helping customers who had their personal data leaked in a major breach rather than briefing lawyers ahead of a potential class action lawsuit, a government minister says.
Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones on Wednesday labelled the move of Optus parent company Singtel to pre-emptively engage lawyers as unfortunate and making a bad situation worse.
His comments came amid reports tens of thousands of Australians had registered their interest in potential class action suits against Optus over the cyber attack.
Legal firm Slater and Gordon, which is taking expressions of interest in one legal action, said the impact of the hack was being felt far and wide, including by domestic violence survivors and stalking victims.
Singtel representatives told the Singapore stock exchange on Monday any class action would be “vigorously defended”, prompting Mr Jones’ rebuke.
“Frankly, I think the Australian people want to see Optus deal with the crisis instead of engaging and briefing lawyers,” he told reporters.
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“Their number-one priority should be communicating with the customers and ensuring them that they have put every step in place to ensure that the bad situation, which resulted from their botch-up with the data handling, isn’t made worse by having that lead to fraud and misuse of that data now.”
The personal details of more than 10 million Optus customers were exposed in the data breach, with up to 50,000 Medicare records and 150,000 passports compromised.
Mr Jones said only a collaborative approach could see the crisis dealt with effectively.
“Yes, we want (Optus) to pay for passports because the costs are going to be incurred immediately … yes, we want you to pay for licences, because people are queuing up and having to pay for a licence replacement,” he said.
“We’re not talking about lawyering up, we’re not talking about any of those liabilities, we’re talking about it quite sensibly.”
