With millions of identity documents exposed in the Optus data breach, many Australians now need to replace their cards and passports to make sure they can’t be used by criminals for fraud and theft.
And with the prime minister confirming on Friday that Optus, not the taxpayer, will at least pay the bill for new passports, how big of a bill can Optus end up with to clean up the mess?
Replacement passports take months to arrive as is, something that is unlikely to improve after the Optus breach.attributed to him:iStock
Estimating these numbers requires a healthy dose of assumptions and guesswork, since there are no solid details about what data was stolen. As many as 9.8 million Australians are believed to have had their personal data compromised, but only 3 million or so had exposure to identity documents such as exposed passports or driver’s licenses, and 37,000 Medicare numbers.
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It’s impossible at this point to say how many individual documents Optus will have to pay to replace, especially given that some people may only have a passport or license exposed but not both, and it’s possible that some of the data is out of date. But suppose an extreme result where the carrier had to pay to replace 3 million passports, 3 million driver’s licenses and 15,000 Medicare cards (22,000 of the exposed numbers had expired).
The licenses are easy to calculate, costing an average of about $27 to replace depending on your state, assuming there won’t be an additional cost to change the numbers and assuming Optus can’t arrange some kind of wholesale discount, the final price drops $81 million.
Passports are a little trickier. It usually costs $193 to replace it, but it can be free in certain situations, so it’s unclear what the actual replacement cost will be in this scenario. So a maximum of $580 million, but most likely it will be a lot less after Optus works out the issue with the department in question, and rolls out customers whose passport information isn’t included or is out of date.
Read more here.
from San Jose News Bulletin https://sjnewsbulletin.com/cabinet-meets-to-discuss-ending-mandatory-covid-19-isolation-companies-face-data-dumping-after-optus-hack-the-cause-of-the-death-of-the-queen-revealed-3/
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